A Resonant Sub-Neptune Harvest at HD 110067

https://www.centauri-dreams.org/

These orbital resonances look a lot like “intelligent design” but they emerge inevitably out of Newton’s laws and the Keplerian geometry of the system. In crowded systems, planets that are not resonantly stable tend to be ejected or collide, at least until they migrate to an orbit that is. There are numerous examples in our own solar system, but few this obvious or dramatic.

The Kirkwood Gaps in the Asteroid Belt are one example, as are the satellite-swept gaps in Saturn’s rings. Pluto is locked into a resonant orbit by Neptune. There are many other examples, include many earth-orbit crossing asteroids that repeatedly cross our orbit but always at a time when we’re NOT there. Think of it as an emergent complexity thing, arising spontaneously out of the very simple Newtonian laws of gravitation. These worlds weren’t deliberately placed in safe orbits, they are the only orbits available that wouldn’t have ended up eventually in a collision or ejection.

A more detailed look at this system can be found here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_110067