Letters from the August 26, 2006, issue of Science News
By Science News
Dust to dust
In “Not a planet?” (SN: 6/17/06, p. 382), Alycia Weinberger says, “The discovery of a disk around the planetary-mass companion to 2M1207 should be a bit of a relief to planet-formation theorists” because it casts doubt on the object being a planet. But wouldn’t our early solar system have been composed of at least two planets, Jupiter and Saturn, that had extensive disks around them before their satellites coalesced into moons?