3 new planets could host life

[longship]

68. But no homogeneous matter is likely to exist in any primordial system.

Primordial planetary systems are chaotic as all hell. There are things smashing into things all over the place. Even after planets begin to form, they also crash into each other. The only planets that survive are those able to form stable orbits after the millions of years of chaos. There may have been more planets in our solar system early on, but the rest of them were likely cast off into interstellar space. Those that remain are here because they attained stable orbits. The rest are long gone.

Gravity is a fairly simple force. But solving it analytically for more than two bodies is impossible. However, it can be modeled for more than two.

What you are suggesting has never been seen. Ever. Furthermore, there seems to be a rule that the more massive a body, the less dense it can be. We know that low density requires lots of low mass stuff. And we know that in order to hold low mass stuff you need large mass. That's the only way it happens. Hydrogen and helium escape earth as soon as they're released into the atmosphere.

But all low density celestial objects have lots of H and He. All of them! And very high mass to retain that H and He. No exceptions. None.

Once you get to the mass of an object great enough to form a spherical body, there's not enough gravity to hold low mass H and He until you get to gas giant mass and size. Below earth mass and a planet doesn't even hold onto much of an atmosphere (Mars) unless there's unusual circumstances (Titan).

I'll give you one thing, though. If there were spherical low density bodies in the universe, they might more easily form as moons to a more massive planet. That's where the great diversity exists in our planetary system. Saturn alone has more diversity in its moons than the planets as a collection.

Fucking interesting shit here. But I am not comfortable with speculations beyond the evidence. I think the reason we see very large low density styrofoam bodies is that they cannot form below a certain mass (other than the degenerate very small mass thing which has effectively little to no self-gravity).

Wow! Thanks for the discussion. It's been a great one. I wonder how Douglas Adams would have written a styrofoam planet into his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series?

I do know how Douglas Adams explained Dark Matter. Dark Matter is composed of all the styrofoam packing peanuts for all the scientific instruments designed to study Dark Matter.

I will leave you with that.