Yesterday's article on supernovae 'triggers' for star and planet formation shed some light on how a shock wave moving through a cloud of gas and dust could not only cause the collapse and contraction of a proto-star but also impart angular momentum to an infant solar system. Today's essay focuses on a somewhat later phase of system formation. Specifically, how is it that gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn can form in the first place, given core accretion models that have 'trigger' problems of their own? Here's the issue: To create a gas giant, you need plenty of hydrogen and helium, material in which a solar nebula would be rich. But we're learning a lot about how planetary systems evolve, and the emerging reality is that the gas disks from which planets are made usually last a comparatively brief time, somewhere on the order of one to ten million years. That would imply that the gas giants had to accumulate their atmospheres within this timeframe. But how? Jupiter's atmosphere is...

With the question of habitable planets on my mind following Andrew LePage's splendid treatment of Kepler-452b on Friday, I want to turn to the interesting news out of San Diego State, where astronomer William Welsh and colleagues have been analyzing a new transiting circumbinary planet, a find that brings us up to a total of ten such worlds. Planets like these, invariably likened to the planet Tatooine from Star Wars, have two suns in their sky. Now we have Kepler-453b to study, a world that presented researchers with a host of problems. Transits of the new world occur only nine percent of the time because of changes in the planet's orbit. Precession -- the change in orientation of the planet's orbital plane -- meant that Kepler couldn't see the planet at the beginning of its mission, but could after it swung into view about halfway through the mission's lifetime, allowing three transits. Clearly, this is a system we could easily have missed, says William Welsh (San Diego State), who...

Where is the dividing line between a large, rocky planet and a 'mini-Neptune?' It's a critical issue, because life is at least possible on one, unlikely on the other. But while we're getting better at figuring out planetary habitable zones, the question of how large a planet can be and remain 'terrestrial' is still unresolved. As Andrew LePage explains below, our view of potentially habitable planets like Kepler-452b depends upon how we analyze this matter -- clearly, just being in or near the habitable zone isn't enough. A prolific essayist with over 100 articles in venues like Scientific American and Sky & Telescope, LePage writes the excellent Drew ex Machina site, where his scrutiny of recent exoplanet finds is intense. The work seems a natural fit given his day job at Visidyne, Inc. near Boston, where he specializes in the processing and analysis of remote sensing data. by Andrew LePage A couple of weeks ago, the media was filled with reports about the discovery of Kepler 452b....

Detecting planets around brown dwarfs is tricky business, but it's worth pursuing not only for its own sake but because planetary systems around brown dwarfs can tell us much about planet formation in general. A new paper from Andrzej Udalski (Warsaw University Observatory) and colleagues makes this point while noting four brown dwarf planets we've thus far found, all of them much larger than Jupiter. An extremely large planet well separated from a brown dwarf suggests a scaled-down binary star system rather than one growing out of an accretion disk. Fortunately, we can use gravitational microlensing to go after much smaller worlds around brown dwarfs, a method that is not compromised by the faintness of both planet and dwarf. In microlensing we don't 'see' the planet but can infer its presence by observing how light from a more distant star is affected as a brown dwarf system passes in front of it. Udalski and team have used microlensing to discover OGLE-2013-BLG-0723LB/Bb, which...

The discovery and confirmation of the exoplanet HD 219134b give us a useful touchstone relatively close to the Solar System. At 21 light years away in the constellation Cassiopeia, HD 219134b distinguishes itself by being the closest exoplanet to Earth to be detected using the transit method. That's useful indeed, because we'll be able to use future instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope to learn about the composition of any atmosphere there. Image: This sky map shows the location of the star HD 219134 (circle), host to the nearest confirmed rocky planet found to date outside of our solar system. The star lies just off the "W" shape of the constellation Cassiopeia and can be seen with the naked eye in dark skies. It actually has multiple planets, none of which are habitable. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/DSS. Too close to its star to be considered a candidate for life, the new world is a 'super-Earth,' sighted by the HARPS-North instrument using radial velocity techniques, which...