Sunday 3 January 2010

Is Earth's 1g solid surface gravity unusually high for exoplanets?

Ultimately we don't know enough about exoplanets to be sure; for now all our data is skewed toward more massive planets which are easier to detect using Doppler wobble, or large diameter planets (almost certainly gas giants) which are easy to detect by their host star dimming when they eclipse it relative to us. More data is coming in every day, and as fantastic as Keplar has been, I think we need to at least hold out for the James-Webb to be online before we draw any really hard conclusions form the data.



Without the data, all we can rely on is our theories of planet formation, which we're fairly good at.
Earth is probably more dense than an average planet of it's size, as a result of it colliding with a roughly mars-sized object (nicknamed Theia) early in it's development. Theia's core would have been absorbed into earth's core, but the outer layers of both were stripped away, creating a ring which would coalesce into our moon. This would leave earth with a higher mass core than a planet forming at its distance would have.



We can see this in the densities of the terrestrial planets;



--Object-------Density (g cm−3)-----Semi-major axis (AU)-



-------------Mean----Uncompressedm-----------------------



-Mercury-----5.4---------5.3-------------0.39------------



-Venus-------5.2---------4.4-------------0.72------------



-Earth-------5.5----------4.4--------------1.0-------------



-Mars--------3.9----------3.8--------------1.5-------------



Credit, Wikipedia



Planets closer to their star are naturally going to have higher densities as a result of mass differentiation; denser material settling to the core of a planet or the center of a solar accretion disk.



Looking at it from the perspective of habitability,
We know that density is positively correlated to surface gravity, so we can expect that earth would have a slightly higher than average surface gravity for a planet in the habitable zone around a star in the category of one solar mass.



That being said, most stars do not have one solar mass, most of the stars in the universe are red dwarfs, which are much dimmer and lighter than our sun, and would have a closer, narrower habitable zone. A habitable planet around a red dwarf would probably be smaller and lighter, but denser, due to its lower mass accretion cloud and closer proximity to it's star respectively.



I think we could expect the majority of exoplanets to be planets similar to mercury orbiting red dwarfs.
If this is the case we can expect that earth would have a high surface gravity relative to terrestrial planets (although FAR more massive terrestrial planets of similar diameter exist) and about average gravity when taking all planets into account.

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