Solar System May Have Had Super-Earths

[Waspie_Dwarf]

New Research Suggests Solar System May Have Once Harbored Super-Earths

Caltech and UC Santa Cruz Researchers Say Earth Belongs to a Second Generation of Planets

Long before Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars formed, it seems that the inner solar system may have harbored a number of super-Earths—planets larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. If so, those planets are long gone—broken up and fallen into the sun billions of years ago largely due to a great inward-and-then-outward journey that Jupiter made early in the solar system's history.

This possible scenario has been suggested by Konstantin Batygin, a Caltech planetary scientist, and Gregory Laughlin of UC Santa Cruz in a paper that appears the week of March 23 in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The results of their calculations and simulations suggest the possibility of a new picture of the early solar system that would help to answer a number of outstanding questions about the current makeup of the solar system and of Earth itself. For example, the new work addresses why the terrestrial planets in our solar system have such relatively low masses compared to the planets orbiting other sun-like stars.

Read more...

[Doc Socks Junior]

Here.

http://authors.library.caltech.edu/55970/2/1423252112.full.pdf

[Indiogene]

Jupiter, the solar system's largest planet, played a vital role in the development of Earth and our Solar System. Jupiter absorbed comets that could struck Earth killing all life so we can say Jupiter defended Earth in its natural history, and now astronomers and other scientists discovered other important roles Jupiter played: the erosion and displacement of former "super-earths" into the sun...which later became the current inner planets: Mercury, Venus, our Earth and Mars.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/25/us/jupiter-solar-system-collision-course/index.html?sr=fb032515jupiter1030aStorygalPhoto

[Sir Wearer of Hats]

I've always wondered if there was a reason it shared a named with the King of the Roman Gods because it was so important in protecting humanity a la Jupiter