planets can be stolen by another star

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An example of anthropomorphic metaphor in public science discourse:

"…fairly small rocky planets two or three times the mass of the earth, in quite tight orbits around their star and you can speculate that they were once giant planets like Jupiter that have had the outer gassy layers blasted off and you are left with the rocky core, or maybe those planets were stolen from another star that got too close"

Prof. Carolin Crawford

Prof. Carolin Crawford (University of Cambridge) was talking on an episode ('The death of stars') of the BBC's In Our Time. (Read 'The complicated social lives of stars')

Read about anthropomorphism

Read examples of anthropomorphism in science

Tags: planets, stars
[Please be aware that a word may have different nuances, or even a different meaning, according to context.]« Back to Index

Author: Keith

Former school and college science teacher, teacher educator, research supervisor, and research methods lecturer. Emeritus Professor of Science Education at the University of Cambridge.