[TML] Bigass Planet X

[Timothy Little]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2007 at 07:28:18AM -0500, Jerry W Barrington wrote:
> Pretty much every way to do that results in a distribution of lots
> of little stuff up thru very few big objects.  That's why I see an
> exponential decay with increasing size fairly appropriate.

I'm not so sure it applies in the case of planets in particular.  In
most of these models the smaller object ends up in belts with other
objects of similar and smaller size, which just count as a single
"orbit" in Traveller terms.

So although the distribution of object sizes probably follows some
sort of power-law, the more numerous smaller objects have a much
larger chance of not clearing their orbit.  They are also more likely
to be perturbed out of orbits that are "near" larger objects.  So
although formation processes favour numerous smaller objects, orbital
dynamics tends to favour either retention of larger ones (if present),
or accumulation of a "belt" (if they are not).

What does this do to the distribution of objects that *do* qualify as
being planets rather than large belt objects?  I don't think we can
know, yet.  We only have a census of planets in one system, and no
idea whether the conditions here were typical.


- Tim