Title: Fractal planets Post by: Tglad on November 18, 2011, 12:12:54 PM This is quite a nice paper that went online today: http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.3986 (http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.3986), the PDF is in the top right, and is quite readable, and in a nice friendly font. I like their idea. The current problem is that people don't think too much about fractal distributions, so they try and categorise planets into simple groups, such as by size. But that doesn't work too well. In the paper they show that if you plot lots of planets on log scales, then the planets fall into three quite neat lines, so three categories of planets that are distributed by three different power laws. In other words, three fractal distributions (clusters), each with their own fractal dimension. |