When astronomers began spotting planets around distant stars in the mid-1990s, they were baffled. Many of these early discoveries involved worlds as big as Jupiter, or even bigger — but they orbit their stars so tightly that their “years” were just days long. Nobody could imagine how a Jupiter 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.
via A New Theory on Why the Sun Never Swallowed the Earth – TIME.
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