Harmony Abounds in This Best of All Possible Worlds

The untutored imagination of the child needs no prompting to be filled with deep wonder at the beauty of this world. Everyone has a touchstone in memory of some such emotion evoked by this ongoing and emerging and uncanny harmony. The deliberate elevation of the mundane by the artistic composition is the aim of the highest and exalted love for humanity sometimes known by the Greek word agape. 

This morning a unique planetary system's discovery came to my attention. It has been given the very uninspiring name TOI-178. However, it should be named in honor of that giant in the annals of astronomy Johannes Kepler. Perhaps Keplerworld. 

This system is in harmonic resonant alignment in its ratio's of  five out of the six of planetary orbits around its star. They are 18:9:6:4:3 for their orbital periods. Thus this amazing discovery upholds and once again confirms the genius of the profound poetic science of  Kepler's discovery of the elliptic harmonic ratios of our own planetary system and the much maligned principle of Leibniz that we live in the best of all possible worlds.

 

This graphic shows a representation of the TOI-178 planetary system, which was revealed by ESA's exoplanet watcher CHEOPS. The system consists of six exoplanets, five of which are locked in a rare rhythmic dance as they orbit their central star. The two inner planets have terrestrial densities (like Earth) and the outer four planets are gaseous (with densities like Neptune and Jupiter). The five outer planets follow a rhythmic dance as they move in their orbits. This phenomenon is called orbital resonance, and it means that there are patterns that repeat themselves as the planets go around the star, with some planets aligning every few orbits. While the planets in the TOI-178 system orbit their star in a very orderly manner, their densities do not follow any particular pattern. One of the exoplanets, a dense, terrestrial planet like Earth is right next to a similar-sized but very fluffy planet ­­– like a mini-Jupiter, and next to that is one very similar to Neptune. Astronomers did not expect to find this lay-out in a planetary system, and this discovery challenges current theories of planet formation. In this graphic, the relative sizes of the planets are to scale, but not the distances and the size of the star. Credit: ESA