Jupiter - perhaps only 6000 years old?

Now this is interesting! It seems like the new theory is that planets can
form from debris orbiting a new star in just a few years, rather than
millions of years!

Considering this and all the troubles and inconsistencies with radioactive
dating methods, perhaps the universe is only 10,000 years old after all!

- j

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Big Planets Form in Hundreds of Years, Not Millions

Thu Nov 28, 2:11 PM ET

By Deborah Zabarenko

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=570&e=11&u=/nm/20021128/sc_
nm/space_planets_dc

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Astronomers unveiled a quick new recipe for creating
big planets, using high-powered supercomputer calculations to show these
gassy giants could form in hundreds of years, instead of millions.

Most scientists have maintained that planets the size of Jupiter, the
largest in our solar system, take several million years to coalesce out of
the massive disks of cosmic debris that surround infant stars.

But research published in Thursday's edition of the journal Science
indicates that these monstrous disks tend to break up after just a few turns
around their star.

As the disk breaks up, matter begins to clump together quickly and starts to
draw in the gases that would otherwise go to form vapor shrouds around
Jupiter-style gas giant planets.

Planets have to form during this early period or the cosmic gas and dust
that would make them is pulled away and dissipated by radiation from nearby
stars, U.S. and Canadian scientists found.

"If a big gas planet can't form quickly, it probably won't form at all,"
astronomer Thomas Quinn of the University of Washington, one of the authors
of the Science report, said in a telephone interview.

Recent research on so-called extrasolar planets orbiting stars outside our
solar system lends support to this theory.

JUPITER-TYPE PLANETS

The fact that astronomers have detected more than 100 Jupiter-type gas giant
planets orbiting other stars besides our sun indicates that these big
planets are fairly common, Quinn said.

If Quinn and his colleagues are correct, this means that most big planets
formed quickly; if they had followed the multimillion-year model, gas giants
would be expected to be rare, with all the raw materials being sucked off by
neighboring stars over time.

Earlier scientists had theorized that the so-called protoplanetary disks
could congeal quickly to create big planets, but lacked the computing power
to create a simulation that would show this, Quinn said.

Supercomputers running powerful programs designed to track the origins of
the cosmos were able to make the detailed calculations showing how these big
planets might form fast.

"It was pretty clear cut," Quinn said, speaking of the computer simulation.
"We just looked at our visualization and saw those are planets, definitely
of the right masses. They're even rotating as fast as we'd expect, as we see
Jupiter rotating.

Quinn said the computer models did not pinpoint any actual big planets that
formed quickly, but indicated that this scenario could work.