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Originally Posted by Kullat Nunu
I'm no expert, but that's what the exoplanet hunters have told. Considering how much distant orbits change when new data points are acquired, a very incomplete orbit probably gives highly unrealistic values. Take for example 55 Cnc d, the outermost planet in the system. It was originally believed to be in a highly eccentric orbit. Now its eccentricity seems to be mere 0.025. Similarly, some of the distant planets have wildly varying values (compare the values of HD 154345 at the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia and the Catalog of Extrasolar Planets. The former suggests a more distant and much more eccentric orbit (9.21 AU, 0.474) compared to the latter more up-to-date values (4.17 AU, 0.050; a very Jupiter-like planet). |
Well, that's good! It shows that the early estimates are rapidly converging on lower eccentricity orbits, so we may not have to wait more than another few years to maybe see other solar systems with Bode-like arrangements.
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Originally Posted by Disinfo Agent
Even when it's a "mere" statistical relation, a scientific law must be followed. Anything else would be kind of unlawful, don't you think?
Now, in pop-postmodernism, of course, all bets are off -- the "law" can be as lax as you will it.
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If it's a statistical law, there are always going to be the exceptions that prove the rule--that's what makes it statistical.
But I take back what I said about Bode's Law being a statistical law. I didn't mean that our solar system is somehow the average of all solar systems.
Instead, I'll stick with the physical (or rather quasi-biological) basis I proposed to explain the striking, obviously nonrandom pattern we observe here. The initial conditions required to produce that pattern may be rare (single, bright star and well-organized disk), but given those initial conditions, one should expect a Bode's-like (logarithmic) spacing of planets.