https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/astro-ph_9710116/Collected HN comments and submissions linking this paper.enMon, 02 Nov 2026 11:16:22 GMThttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16767703urn:hackerpapers:mention:astro-ph_9710116:16767703Thu, 05 Apr 2018 18:37:47 GMT<p>As a former dynamicist, the underlying reason for this correlation is that planetary systems with many planets are always on the edge of dynamical instability. In other words, these kinds of planetary systems with lots of planets are always packed with as many planets as they can support over any given lifetime. It then turns out that the stability criteria imply that the system cannot be any more packed than having approximately log-equal spacing. In fact, if you take a star and put planets around it with a log uniform distribution and evolve it for a while, you find that eventually the…</p><p><a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/astro-ph_9710116/">Paper and discussion history</a>. A mention is not an endorsement.</p>astro-ph