A massive young planet on the borderline between gas giant and brown dwarf is telling us a bit more about planet formation in general, and circumstellar disk dynamics in particular. Known as HD 106906b, the world is 11 times the mass of Jupiter and no more than 13 million years old. Its position 650 AU from its star creates an orbit that takes 1500 years to complete. The host HD 106906, about 300 light years from Earth, is an F5-class star in the constellation Crux, the southern constellation dominated by the asterism we call the Southern Cross. What we find here is a debris disk that is non-circular, its shape evidently explained by the presence, well outside the disk, of HD 106906b, whose orbit is elliptical. Observations through the Gemini Planet Imager, the Hubble Space Telescope and ESO’s SPHERE (Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch instrument) show that we are viewing the disk nearly edge-on. The inner region appears cleared of small dust grains. Working with...

The data recently made available from Campaign 12 of K2 (the Kepler spacecraft’s two-reaction wheel mission) is already paying off in the form of information about the outermost planet in the TRAPPIST-1 system. Campaign 12 (described in Kepler Data on TRAPPIST-1 Coming Online) began on December 15 of 2016 and ran until March 4 of this year, though the spacecraft was in safe mode for a time, producing a 5-day data loss. An international team including lead author Rodrigo Luger (University of Washington) and TRAPPIST-1 planet discoverer Michaël Gillon (Université de Liège) used the K2 data to constrain the period of TRAPPIST-1h, the outermost planet in this seven-planet system, which had only been observed to transit once before now. The team was also looking for additional planets (none were found) and, of course, examining resonances with the inner worlds. The result: The orbital period of TRAPPIST-1h is found to be 18.764 days, a figure that fits into the pattern of resonance that...

While we’ve all had our eyes fixed on TRAPPIST-1 (amid the still lingering excitement of the discovery of Proxima Centauri b), news about another stellar neighbor has caused only a faint stir. But what’s happening around HD 219134 (Gliese 892) is noteworthy, and it’s interesting to see that Michaël Gillon (University of Liège – Belgium) has had a hand in it. Gillon, after all, led the work on TRAPPIST-1’s two waves of exoplanet discoveries, culminating in the startling assemblage of seven Earth-sized worlds around the dim ultracool dwarf star. HD 219134 is an orange K-class star (K3V) in the constellation Cassiopeia, and only about half the distance, at 21.25 light years, as TRAPPIST-1 (about 40 light years out). It was known before the recent Gillon et al. paper in Nature Astronomy that we had a super-Earth, HD 219134 b, in orbit here, which was soon joined by two more super-Earths, a gas giant and, a few months later, another two planets, making for a total of six. This system...

K2 Campaign 12 is an observational window that comes at the right time. Operating as the K2 mission, the Kepler spacecraft collected data from December 15, 2016 to March 4 of this year on the TRAPPIST-1 system. With seven planets, at least six of them likely to be rocky worlds, TRAPPIST-1 is suddenly high on everyone's target list for future observation. The new Kepler data are a key part of this, as Geert Barentsen, K2 research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California, explains: "Scientists and enthusiasts around the world are invested in learning everything they can about these Earth-size worlds. Providing the K2 raw data as quickly as possible was a priority to give investigators an early look so they could best define their follow-up research plans. We're thrilled that this will also allow the public to witness the process of discovery." The raw cadence data -- 'cadence' refers to the time between observations of the same target -- are available from...

The seven planets circling the star TRAPPIST-1 have been lionized in the media, and understandably so, given that more than one have the potential for habitability. But of course M-dwarfs call up the inevitable problems associated with such tiny stars. Habitable planets must orbit close to the star, with the probability of tidal lock and subsequent climatic issues. Moreover, the flare activity particularly in young M-dwarfs gives cause for concern. It's the latter issue that Jack T. O'Malley-James and Lisa Kaltenegger (both at Cornell, where Kaltenegger is director of the Carl Sagan Institute) have explored in a new paper to be published in The Astrophysical Journal. As the paper explains, the question of habitability becomes troubling when we realize how frequently an M-dwarf can flare. Proxima Centauri, an M5 star, undergoes intense flares every 10 to 30 hours, with effects on the planet in its habitable zone that are still unknown. Can a planet with high doses of ultraviolet...

Are we homing in on a 'missing link' in our theories of planet formation? Perhaps so, judging from the work of researchers at Swinburne University of Technology, Lyon University and St. Andrews University. The work does not challenge a central principle in current thinking, that planets form out of disks of gas and dust grains around young stars. We know that these dust grains grow into centimeter-sized aggregates. We also know that, much later, planetesimals (kilometers in size) grow into planetary cores. What has been missing is an understanding of how the early 'pebbles' are able to aggregate into asteroid-sized objects. One problem is that drag in the disk produced by surrounding gas makes the grains move inward toward the star, a movement that can deplete the disk. The paper describes this as a 'radial drift barrier,' in which the grains settle to the midplane of the disk and drift inwards as they lose angular momentum. Taken to its conclusion, the process can lead to accretion...

The binary system SDSS 1557, about 1000 light years from Earth, was thought to be a single white dwarf star until detailed measurements revealed that the brighter star was being gravitationally influenced by a hither unseen brown dwarf. And that, in turn, has given us an intriguing look at possible planetary formation around both members of a close binary. We've found gas giants in such systems, but researchers led by Jay Farihi (University College London) have found signs of rocky debris here that point to the possibility of planets of a much different composition. "Building rocky planets around two suns is a challenge," says Farihi, "because the gravity of both stars can push and pull tremendously, preventing bits of rock and dust from sticking together and growing into full-fledged planets. With the discovery of asteroid debris in the SDSS 1557 system, we see clear signatures of rocky planet assembly via large asteroids that formed, helping us understand how rocky exoplanets are...

Our understanding of habitable zones is a work in progress, but the detection of multiple planets with potentially water-bearing surfaces around TRAPPIST-1 is heartening. Today we examine the prospect of extending the habitable zone further out from the host star than previously thought possible. The idea is found in new work by Ramses Ramirez and Lisa Kaltenegger (both at the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University). Volcanism is the key, allowing interactive effects that pump up greenhouse warming and sustain habitability. Go back for a moment to the habitable zone limits that Andrew LePage looked at yesterday in his analysis of TRAPPIST-1. The classical habitable zone -- allowing liquid water to exist on the surface -- has an inner edge at which surface temperatures become high enough to lead to a runaway greenhouse and the rapid loss of water. The outer edge is defined by the distance beyond which CO2 can no longer produce the needed greenhouse effect to keep the surface warm....

When the news about the seven planets of TRAPPIST-1 broke, I immediately wondered what Andrew LePage's take on habitability would be. A physicist and writer with numerous online essays and a host of articles in magazines like Scientific American and Sky & Telescope, LePage is also a specialist in the processing and analysis of remote sensing data. He has put this background in data analytics to frequent use in his highly regarded 'habitable planet reality checks,' which can be found on his Drew ex Machina site. Having run a thorough analysis of the TRAPPIST-1 situation the other day, Drew now gives us the gist of his findings, which move at least several of the TRAPPIST-1 planets into a potentially interesting category indeed. By Andrew LePage Like so many other people interested in exoplanets, I made it a point to watch NASA's press conference live on February 22. Based on the list of participants released by NASA a couple of days earlier, a number of people (myself included)...

Let's turn the clock back a bit on the TRAPPIST-1 discoveries with a reminder of Hubble work on this system announced last July. A team led by Julien de Wit (MIT) used the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 to look for atmospheres on TRAPPIST-1b and 1c, two of the three planets then known around this star. The researchers were able to take advantage of a rare simultaneous transit, when both planets crossed the star within minutes of each other, an event that has been calculated to occur only every two years. The result: No sign of the kind of hydrogen-dominated atmospheres we would expect on gaseous worlds. That was good news, for reasons that Nikole Lewis (Space Telescope Science Institute) explained: "The lack of a smothering hydrogen-helium envelope increases the chances for habitability on these planets. If they had a significant hydrogen-helium envelope, there is no chance that either one of them could potentially support life because the dense atmosphere would act...

In yesterday's news conference on the seven planets around TRAPPIST-1, exoplanet scientist Sara Seager (MIT) pointed to the discovery as accelerating our search for habitable worlds. "Goldilocks," Seager said in a finely chosen turn of phrase, "has many sisters in this system." I think she's exactly correct, even though we don't yet know if any of these particular worlds house life. For as Seager went on to point out, we now need to study the atmospheres of these planets to find out what's really going on, especially on potentially habitable TRAPPIST-1e, f and g. Seager's enthusiasm for TRAPPIST-1 is based on the fact that, whatever we eventually learn about its planets, we're seeing such an abundance of possibilities here that similar, possibly life-bearing systems are doubtless commonplace. And with this system, we have transiting worlds in the solar neighborhood whose atmospheres can be analyzed by upcoming missions like the James Webb Space Telescope, or via installations on the...