17 papers · ranked by Valyu relevance
Andrew W. Howard
Observational surveys for extrasolar planets probe the diverse outcomes of planet formation and evolution. These surveys measure the frequency of planets with different masses, sizes, orbital characteristics, and host star properties. Small planets between the sizes of Earth and Neptune substantially outnumber…
Giovanna Tinetti
Planetary science beyond the boundaries of our Solar System is today in its infancy. Until a couple of decades ago, the detailed investigation of the planetary properties was restricted to objects orbiting inside the Kuiper Belt. Today, we cannot ignore that the number of known planets has increased by two orders of…
Guillermo Gonzalez
Our understanding of the processes that are relevant to the formation and maintenance of habitable planetary systems is advancing at a rapid pace, both from observation and theory. The present review focuses on recent research that bears on this topic and includes discussions of processes occurring in astrophysical…
Simran Kaur, Varinderjit Kaur
Cosmos has always sparked human curiosity to unveil and speculate its fascinating secrets. This curiosity has ultimately opened a window to other worlds. After years of observation, computation, and data analysis, scientists have revealed the diversity in exoplanets that have been helpful in the characterization and…
Martin Turbet, Emeline Bolmont, Vincent Bourrier, Brice-Olivier Demory + 3 more
'Brice-Olivier Demory' 'Jérémy Leconte' 'James Owen' 'Eric T. Wolf'] TRAPPIST-1 is a fantastic nearby (∼39.14 light years) planetary system made of at least seven transiting terrestrial-size, terrestrial-mass planets all receiving a moderate amount of irradiation. To date, this is the most observationally favourable…
Kevin Heng, Joshua N. Winn
Kevin Heng is an assistant professor of astrophysics at the University of Bern, Switzerland (Twitter: @KevinHeng1). He is a core science team member of the CHEOPS mission and is involved in the PLATO mission. Joshua Winn is associate professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was a member of the…
G. Laughlin, Jack J. Lissauer
Thousands of extrasolar planets have been discovered, and it is clear that the galactic planetary census draws on a diversity greatly exceeding that exhibited by the solar system's planets. We review significant landmarks in the chronology of extrasolar planet detection, and we give an overview of the varied…
F. van der Tak
perspective Authors: ['F. van der Tak'] Abstract As of 2023, over 5500 planets are known to orbit stars other than our Sun. We can measure their sizes and orbital periods, infer their masses and temperatures, and constrain their compositions. Based on these data, about 1% of extrasolar planets are potentially habitable…
P. Chaturvedi, Ashok K. Singal
Lying wide-awake in a cool midsummer night on the house terrace, a pastime that has these days become rare, some daydreamer amongst us looking up at the star-studded sky might have wondered if there is someone (an intelligent being!) up there in an alien world around one of the far-distant stars, right now looking down…
Robert A. Wittenmyer, Jonathan Horner, Brad Carter, Stephen R. Kane + 2 more
'Peter Plavchan' 'David R. Ciardi'] Summary: Super Earths, planets between 5-10 Earth masses, are the most common type of exoplanet known, yet are completely absent from our Solar system. As a result, their detailed properties, compositions, and formation mechanisms are poorly understood. NASA's Transiting Exoplanet…
Jonathan I. Lunine, Neta Bahcall
Two other papers discuss the application of JWST data to problems of keen interest in extrasolar planetary science. Millholland and Winn (9) describe the various dynamical phenomena inherent in exoplanet systems that can be diagnosed with JWST observations. The decay of the orbits of close-in Jupiters, subject to…
Samuel Arbesman, Gregory Laughlin, Enrico Scalas
Background The search for a habitable extrasolar planet has long interested scientists, but only recently have the tools become available to search for such planets. In the past decades, the number of known extrasolar planets has ballooned into the hundreds, and with it, the expectation that the discovery of the first…
Dirk Schulze-Makuch, René Heller, Edward Guinan
The fact that Earth is teeming with life makes it appear odd to ask whether there could be other planets in our galaxy that may be even more suitable for life. Neglecting this possible class of “superhabitable” planets, however, could be considered anthropocentric and geocentric biases. Most important from the…
Tim Lichtenberg, Dan J. Bower, Mark Hammond, Ryan Boukrouche + 3 more
'Patrick Sanan' 'Shang‐Min Tsai' 'Raymond T. Pierrehumbert'] Title: Abstract The earliest atmospheres of rocky planets originate from extensive volatile release during magma ocean epochs that occur during assembly of the planet. These establish the initial distribution of the major volatile elements between different…
Aoi Murakami, Yu Komatsu, Kenji Takizawa
The vegetation red-edge of terrestrial plants is a key biosignature for detecting Earth-like habitable exoplanets. Although water is essential for plants, an excess of water can limit the distribution of terrestrial vegetation. On planets with extensive water coverage and limited land, floating vegetation on the…
Dirk Schulze-Makuch, Alberto G. Fairén, Manasvi Lingam
There are two types of rogue planets, sub-brown dwarfs and “rocky” rogue planets. Sub-brown dwarfs are unlikely to be habitable or even host life, but rocky rogue planets may have a liquid ocean under a thick atmosphere or an ice layer. If they are overlain by an insulating ice layer, they are also referred to as…
Harrison B. Smith, Alexa Drew, Sara I. Walker
The concept of the origin of life implies that initially, life emerged from a non-living medium. If this medium was Earth’s geochemistry, then that would make life, by definition, a geochemical process. The extent to which life on Earth today could subsist outside of the geochemistry from which it is embedded is poorly…