How Do Planets Form? 

This blog concerns THE SECOND LINK to Quanta Magazine which a correspondent sent to me. The blog about the first link can be found HERE. 

The article from Quanta is very long and covers a lot of research into planet formation. Much of the data comes from an observatory in the Atacama Desert of Chile - The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). 

It has been discovered that all the planetary systems discovered so far are nothing like our Solar System. The first exo-planet was discovered in 1995; since then the number of "hot Jupiters" and "sub-Neptunes" has increased greatly. But nothing has been found resembling our complement of four rocky worlds and four gas giants.

To explain our situation planet moving theories have to be invoked and these are discussed in the article. As you might expect there are countless controversies and no cast iron conclusions. Read the article to get a flavour of what is going on in the cosmological world.