Steamy, sultry friday, and we ask the iPod: what is going on with 2M1207B? Is it a mash up, as predicted?
Whoosh goes the randomizer.
Whoosh.
- The Covering: Goodbye Blue Sky - Pink Floyd
- The Crossing: Wide Open Spaces - Dixie Chicks
- The Crown: God's Comic - Elvis Costello
- The Root: Waiting for the Worms - Pink Floyd
- The Past: Mr Jones - Talking Heads
- The Future: The Space Race is Over - Billy Bragg
- The Questioner: A Little Cat Cat Cat
- The House: Il Pleut Bergere - Sien Diels
- The Inside: Proud Mary - Creedence Clearwater Revival
- The Outcome: Frosty the Snowman
Damn, it is!
Ooh, I don't like "The Space Race is Over" as the Future Card.
That + the NRC report are pretty troubling for high-energy astrophysics.
Very unlikely. That mass, at 50 Au, gives a Safronov number
of about 1.e4, so encounters are much more likely to lead to
ejections than collisions.
The mass ratio and separation of the 2M1207 system is suspiciously non-planetary anyway. Maybe it's better to regard the system as a binary brown dwarf of sorts.
well, that is the issue - whether the secondary is plausibly planet mass.
the ejection vs collision probability can be circumvented, simplest way is if the secondary has a system of galilean moons, it is dynamically young, it is not implausible there'd be slowly developing instabilities leading to internal scattering and collision
too early to tell, but intriguing to speculate about