There's a lot of literature on this subject. What I found is just the tip of the iceberg... a very intriguing mystery! -Foxtrot 04:33, 6 September 2008 (EDT)
Atheistic scientists are stumped by this mystery?... Does that imply that theistic scientists have solved the riddle? --DavidN 12:18, 6 September 2008 (EDT)
- This article is full of inaccuracies, for a start these gaseous envelopes are a feature of planetary nebular, and surround proto-planets, not current planets like Jupiter and Saturn orbiting main sequence stars like our sun like the current wording of the article seems to suggest. The Mystery seems to cite earth's (or i presume, proto-earth's) lack of an envelope to be an oddity unexplained by science, however one of the articles cited for this article, "Formation of gas and ice giant planets" Alan P. Boss itself states "It is generally accepted that the terrestrial planets formed in the inner solar nebula through the collisional accumulation of successively larger, solid bodies – starting from sub-micron-sized dust grains, through kilometer-sized planetesimals and lunar-sized planetary embryos, and leading finally to Earth-size planets" and itself cites "Formation of the Earth" G.W. Wetherill (1990) to detail this. The terrestrial would never grow large enough to pass the critical core mass required for core collapse (Instability of a Gaseous Envelope Surrounding a Planetary Core and Formation of Giant Planets states this on the top of page 10) so gas in the terrestrial regions would have been expelled by the harsh stellar winds of the young sun. In none of the cited articles is proto-earth mentioned to be oddly missing an expected envelope.
- The hubble article [2] which is cited along after the section stating "However, the [Galileo and Cassini probe missions] prompted more questions than they answered, leaving atheistic scientists in the dark about the mysteries of the universe and Who created them." is confusing at the best of times, given the fact that the article is about Nebula NGC 6543 a completely different kind of star and nebula than what would have become the solar system, i can find no mention of anything in the article about proto-planets like Jupiter and Saturn, it seems the article is only linked so the line "Many aspects of the process that leads a star to lose its gaseous envelope are still poorly known" could be quoted. (which is itself odd because it is mentioning the gaseous envelope of the entire nebular and the rest of this article is focusing on the individual gaseous nebulas that collapse into gas giant type planets.
- The article cited [3] matches what all the other articles cited say, that these evenlopes collapse in when the proto-planet becomes massive to a certain point and thus become full on gas planets, and that the smaller terrestrial planets are too small for this collapse to happen.
- All in all i find this article terribly confusing it its points and lacking and citing for what it describes are the main points of this "mystery", That saturn and jupiter currently have gas envelopes but earth and neptune do not. --SCarter 16:13, 6 September 2008 (EDT)
- SCarter, thank you for your interest in this article however I politely disagree with your points. The articles cited may claim to explain why the Earth has no gaseous envelope, but this is an ad-hoc explanation. They observed that planets that were the Earth's distance (or less) from the sun and which were the Earth's size (or less) did not have gasesous envelopes, so then they argued that there must have been something shielding them--the concept of an inner solar nebula and this region happened to be defined to be just big enough to cover these planets and therefore "explain" the formation difference in these planets. Sounds like circular reasoning to me. Furthermore, it says nothing about why Neptune has no gaseous envelope --that planet is even further out than Jupiter and Saturn so it certainly wasn't in the "inner solar nebula" that the Earth was supposedly in.
- The scientists are not in agreement at all - the contending ideas (bottom-up or top-down) are as far apart as you can be and the scientists themselves admit that a preference for one idea over another would be purely theoretical. If you still feel the cited sources are insufficient, I would invite you to find some more. As I mentioned at the start of the talk page, there were many articles that talked about these points and those four were what I found in just a half hour search! -Foxtrot 18:18, 6 September 2008 (EDT)