Wikipedia:Peer review/Solar System/archive3

Solar system edit

I've made some alterations as per previous peer reviews. Please tell me what you think. I'm particularly interested in how many more references are needed.

Serendipodous 08:36, 1 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It looks much improved from the past review. Nice work! I just have a few comments:

I'm still having a problem with the section on the solar system "remaining out of the spiral arms", per, "The solar system appears to have remained between spiral arms for most of the existence of life on Earth." Is there a reference for this? Galaxies can be pretty dynamic places, especially with collisions and gravitational interactions. So how do we know this? Also to me the term "very remarkable orbit" is bordering on non-neutral. Is it really that remarkable that we're moving at the same velocity and orbit as the star-forming regions from which the Sun was formed?
The "+-" can be displayed more cleanly as ± using the ± tag.
I have some difficulties with these two statements:
- "...it is estimated that the solar system as we know it today will last another billion years or so, until the Sun begins to use up the hydrogen at its core."

The Sun is always using up the hydrogen in its core. It is not expected to become a Red Giant for 4-5 billion years. So I am unclear what is going to happen in a "billion years or so". Is the article talking about the steady increase in solar brightness that occurs over the course of it's life span?

- "This will require it to expand to eighty times its current diameter, and, about 7.5 billion years from now, to become a red giant, cooled and dulled by its vastly increased surface area."

The 7.5 billion years looks like an overestimate to me. If the Sun lives roughly 10 billion years on the main sequence and it is 4.5 billion years old, the math doesn't add up for me.

Thanks! :-) — RJH (talk) 20:04, 2 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your advice :-) I've rephrased the lines in the "billion years or so" section in the hope of making it clearer, and added the ± symbol. As to your other query, this site is the source I used for that paragraph, and it seems to agree with the statement made. Most of the info for the "Future" section is taken from this source. Not being a professional astronomer, I can't vouch for it, but it seems rock solid. Hope that helps! Serendipodous 20:58, 2 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, it looks good. One final suggestion would be to change the "As the Sun brightens and expands" to "As the Sun brightens and expands somewhat", so it's clear the text isn't describing the red giant stage. There's also some references on the topic in the Earth#Earth.27s_future section, if that is of interest. — RJH (talk) 15:50, 3 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Please see automated peer review suggestions here. Thanks, Andy _t 14:59, 3 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure the article's layout is logical or clear. I suggested before that constructing an ideal TOC is a good way to start designing the ideal article. At the moment the article is also very messy, with many different image widths and a haphazard layout (most to the right, a few to the left). Section headings don't all conform to the MOS either. I don't think the tables of attributes should be included - they might be useful as their own articles but here they just clutter up the article. I'm not keen on the massive infobox at the bottom. References - there are lots of them, but none seem to be to scientific papers, and some are to other encyclopaedias. The latter should definitely be avoided, and citing peer-reviewed science is the best way to go for authoritativeness. Worldtraveller 15:44, 4 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm too close to this article's layout, since I created it. I'd need someone else to come up with a superior draft. The tables probably should be shifted to their own page. I've never liked the infobox either, but it is a useful portal to Solar System articles. Perhaps it should be its own Solar system portal page?

OK I've done it. I've also shifted all the images to the right and standardised their widths at 200 px, though I think it's distorted them somewhat. EDIT: I've just re-drafted the images so that some of them are bigger and some smaller. It makes no sense to lose the details. I've also taken down the "Minor planets" section; without the tables it loses its purpose in the article, and there are plenty of other articles (minor planet, Definition of planet) which cover those issues very well. As for finding better references, I'll have to leave that to someone else; there's only so much work I can do on this article alone. Serendipodous 16:56, 4 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]