Scientists have discovered a giant planet orbiting a tiny red dwarf star, something they believed wasn t even possible. The planet, TOI-6894b, is about the size of Saturn but orbits a star just a fifth the mass of our Sun. This challenges long-standing ideas about how big planets form, especially around small stars.
Let’s not size shame the planet or the star here
I’m not super smart by any means… But maybe scientists could be wrong on gravity well a red dwarf star could make?
It’s not the orbit that’s weird, it’s the planet’s formation in the first place.
Then it’s probably a captured orbit.
Of course they could be wrong. Scientists being human frequently are, until scientific rigor proves them to be correct.
We rarely prove something correct. In mathematics, logical proofs are a thing, but in astronomy and physics it is moreso the case that we usually have a model that is accurate enough for our predictions, until we find evidence to the contrary, like here, and have an opportunity to learn and improve.
You really can’t ever prove a lot of things to be correct: you would have to show that no more cases exist that are not covered. But even despite the lack of proven correctness for all cases, these models are useful and provide correct predictions (most of the time), science is constantly on the lookout for cases where the model is wrong or incorrect.
Probably a death star.
You see, there’s a race of beings so intelligent, long lived, and generally amazing that we mere humans can only think of them as ‘gods.’
But even thy can succumb to the lure of using a Chatbot AI instead of doing their own work.
Yeah, same: It’s the Earth
