Relief, At Last!

For years I have been laying awake at night, and sometimes missing deadlines at work, because of my all-consuming fear that our planet, Earth, might get “eaten” (meaning sucked into the destroying heat) by our sun. Being a long time student of such things, I have known for years that many smaller planets (like Earth) could suffer the same fate as others. Just imagine how Earth or anything like it could form in such a hostile location, where the radiation of the parent star would have pushed the light gas — which makes up most of such a planet’s mass — out to the farthest reaches of the solar system before it could ever coalesce.

Well, models developed by really bright scientists, have “suggested that a little world like Earth shouldn’t exist at all; it (or more precisely, the moon-size proto-planets that eventually assembled into Earth) should have spiraled into the sun more than 4 billion years ago. A star might not gobble a Jupiter whole when it moves close enough, but it could surely swallow a canapé like proto-Earth.”

Now, at last, I am relieved to discover that brilliant men, have solved the issue and I can spend my final days knowing that our Earth is safe. “Mac Low and his collaborator Sijme-Jan Paardekooper, now at Cambridge, found that there are places where the net force pushes a planet inward, but other places where it pushes outward. And in between those are places where the net force is pretty much zero. Once planets move into these regions,’ he says, ‘they stay.’ And that includes small planets like ours.”

Thank God, our planet will continue on, and we know now it is because of the “zero spaces.” I cannot tell you the relief that has flooded by mind!

[Quotes from an article at Time Online by Michael Lemonick]