Hot Jupiters (notice I’ve finally stopped putting the term into quotation marks) were the obvious early planets to detect, even if no one had any idea whether such things existed. I suppose you could say Greg Matloff knew, at least to the point that he helped Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes come up with a plot scenario involving a planet that fit the description in their novel Encounter with Tiber (Grand Central, 1996), which was getting published just as the hot Jupiter 51 Pegasi b was being discovered. Otto Struve evidently predicted the existence of gas giants close to their star as far back as 1952, but it’s certainly true that planets like this weren’t in the mainstream of astronomical thinking when 51 Pegasi b popped up. Selection effect works wonders, and it makes sense that radial velocity methods would bear first fruit with a large planet working its gravitational effects on the star it orbits closely. Today, using transits, gravitational microlensing, astrometry and even direct...

The gradual accretion of material within a protoplanetary disk should, in conventional models, allow us to go all the way from dust grains to planetesimals to planets. But a new way of examining the latter parts of this process has emerged at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson. There, in a research effort led by Erik Asphaug, a revised model of planetary accretion has been developed that looks at collisions between large objects and distinguishes between ‘hit-and-run’ events and accretionary mergers. The issue is germane not just for planet formation, but also for the appearance of our Moon, which the researchers treat in a separate paper to extend the model for early Earth and Venus interactions that appears in the first. In the Earth/Venus analysis, an impact might be a glancing blow that, given the gravitational well produced by the Sun, could cause a surviving large part of an Earth-impactor (the authors call this a ‘runner’) to move inward and...

A 'hot Saturn' with a difference, that's WASP-127b. Although it's 525 light years away, we've learned a surprising amount about the planet's atmosphere. Details come via the ongoing Europlanet Science Congress 2021, now being held virtually for pandemic reasons, at which Romain Allart (iREx/Université de Montréal and Université de Genève) spoke this week. WASP-127b is quite an unusual planet with or without cloud cover. It's orbiting its star in a scant four days, amped up by stellar irradiation levels 600 times what the Earth receives from the Sun. That would, the researcher points out, produce temperatures in the range of 1100 degrees Celsius (over 1370 Kelvin). The result of all these factors is a world with a fifth the mass of Jupiter actually inflating into a radius 1.3 larger than Jupiter. The word in vogue among astrophysicists for a planet like this seems to be 'fluffy,' which pretty much describes it. Image: WASP-127b compared with planets of our Solar...

I mentioned yesterday that we are just opening up the discovery space when it comes to exoplanets. It's an obvious observation for those who follow these things, but I suspect most casual observers don't realize that almost all the planetary systems we've found thus far are located relatively close to the Sun, almost always within no more than a few thousand light years. Most of the stars the Kepler mission observed in Cygnus, Lyra and Draco were about the same distance from galactic center as the Earth. The average distance to the target stars of this most productive of all exoplanet missions yet was 600 to 3,000 light years. Kepler, like TESS, worked by studying the transits of planets across their host stars, and in Kepler's case, the method was unable to detect transits at distances any larger than these. In fact, we have only one method that can detect exoplanets at a wide range of distances in the Milky Way, and that is gravitational microlensing, which can take us into the...

It's a measure of how common exoplanet detection has become that I can't even remember the identity of the object I'm about to describe. Back in the early days (which means not long after the first main sequence detection, the planet at 51 Pegasi), I was at a small dinner gathering talking informally about how you find these objects. A gas giant was in the news, another new world, or was it really a brown dwarf? And just what was a brown dwarf in the first place? Back then, with just a handful of known exoplanets, introducing the idea of a brown dwarf raised a lot of questions. Now, of course, we have planets in the thousands and are just opening up the discovery space. Brown dwarfs are plentiful, with some estimates at one brown dwarf for every six main sequence stars. A 2017 analysis of a cluster called RCW 38 by Koraljka Muzic and team concluded that the galaxy contains between 25 and 100 billion brown dwarfs. So we have plenty to work with as we home in on the still controversial...

We’ve just seen the coinage of a new word that denotes an entirely novel category of planets. Out of research at the University of Cambridge comes a paper on a subset of habitable worlds the scientists have dubbed ‘Hycean’ planets. These are hot, ocean-covered planets with habitable surface conditions under atmospheres rich in hydrogen. The authors believe they are more common than Earth-class worlds (although much depends upon their composition), and should offer considerable advantages when it comes to the detection of biosignatures. Hycean worlds give us another habitable zone, this one taking in a larger region than the liquid water habitable zone we’ve always considered as the home to Earth. In every respect they challenge our categories. Not so long ago a Cambridge team led by Nikku Madhusudhan found that K2-18b, 2.6 times Earth’s radius and 8.6 times its mass, could maintain liquid water at habitable temperatures beneath its hydrogen atmosphere. The team has now generalized...

The most common objection I hear about what we call the ‘habitable zone’ is that it specifies conditions only for life as we know it. It leaves out, for example, conceivable biospheres under the ice of gas giant moons, examples of which we possibly have here in the Solar System. But there is another issue with defining habitability in terms of atmospheric pressures that can support liquid water on the surface. As Jason Wright and Noah Tuchow (both at Penn State) point out in a recent paper, the classic habitable zone concept does not take the evolution of both planet and star into account. It’s a solid point. A planet now residing in the habitable zone could have remained habitable since the earliest era of its formation. Or it could have become habitable at a later time. Thus Tuchow and Wright make a distinction between what they refer to as the Continuous Habitable Zone (CHZ) and a class of planets they refer to as ‘belatedly habitable.’ These worlds may benefit from changes in the...

Looking at flare activity in young M-dwarf stars, as we did in the last post, brings out a notable difference between these fast-spinning stars and stars like the Sun. Across stellar classifications from M- to F-, G- and K-class stars, there is commonality in the fusion of hydrogen into helium in the stellar cores. But the Sun has a zone at which energy carried toward the surface as radiative photons is absorbed or scattered by dense matter. At this point, convection begins as colder matter moves downward and hot matter rises. This radiative zone giving way to convection is distinctive -- stars in the M-class range, a third of the mass of the Sun and lower, do not possess a radiative core, but undergo convection throughout their interior. Image: Interior structure of the Sun. Credit: kelvinsong / Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0. If we're going to account for magnetic phenomena like starspots, flares and coronal mass ejections, we can come up with a model that fits stars with a...

We can learn a lot about stars by studying magnetic activity like starspots, flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Starspots are particularly significant for scientists using radial velocity methods to detect planets, because they can sometimes mimic the signature of a planet in the data. But the astrobiology angle is also profound: Young M-dwarfs, known for flare activity, could be fatally compromised as hosts for life because strong flares can play havoc with planetary atmospheres. Given the ubiquity of M-dwarfs -- they’re the most common type of star in our galaxy -- we’d like to know whether or not they are candidates for supporting life. A paper from Ekaterina Ilin and team at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam digs into the question by looking at the orientation of magnetic activity on young M-dwarfs. The sample is small, though carefully chosen from the processing of over 3000 red dwarf signatures obtained by TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite...

How planets grow in double-star systems has always held a particular fascination for me. The reason is probably obvious: In my younger days, when no exoplanets had been discovered, the question of what kind of planetary systems were possible around multiple stars was wide open. And there was Alpha Centauri in our southern skies, taunting us by its very presence. Could a life-laden planet be right next door? What Kedron Silsbee and Roman Rafikov have been working on extends well beyond Alpha Centauri, usefully enough, and helps us look into how binaries like Centauri A and B form planets. Says Rafikov (University of Cambridge), "A system like this would be the equivalent of a second Sun where Uranus is, which would have made our own solar system look very different." How true. In fact, imagining how different our system would work if we had a star among the outer planets raises wonderful questions. Could we have a habitable world around each star in such a binary? And if so, wouldn't...

The things we look for around other stars do not necessarily surprise us. I think most astronomers were thinking we'd find planets around a lot of stars when the Kepler mission began its work. The question was how many -- Kepler was to give us a statistical measurement on the planet population within its field of stars, and it succeeded brilliantly. These days it seems clear that we can find planets around most stars, in all kinds of sizes and orbits, as we continue to seek an Earth 2.0.. The continuing news about the star PDS 70, a young T Tauri star about 400 light years away in Centaurus, fits the same mold. Here we're talking not just about planets but their moons. No exomoons have been confirmed, but there seems no reason to assume we won't begin to find them -- surely the process of forming moons is as universal as that of planet formation. The interest is in the observation, how it is made, and what it implies about our ability to move forward in characterizing planetary...

The NEID spectrograph has passed the Operational Readiness Review necessary for final acceptance and regular operations. Developed by NASA and the National Science Foundation's NN-EXPLORE exoplanet science program, it has been put through a lengthy commissioning process in the five years since the radial velocity planet hunter design was selected. NEID is mounted on the WIYN 3.5m telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, and we now have word that its scientific mission has begun. Image: Sunset over Kitt Peak National Observatory during NEID commissioning in January 2020. Credit: Paul Robertson. As a radial velocity instrument, NEID is all about the tugs one or more planets exert on the host star, as measured radially -- toward Earth, then away from it -- during the planets' orbits. The Doppler shift in the star's light contains the information. That these are exquisitely tiny measurements should be obvious. Jupiter induces a 13 meter per second wobble on our star, but...

300 light years from Earth in the constellation Musca, the gas giant TYC 8998-760-1 b, along with a companion planet, orbits an infant K-class star about 17 million years old. We're probably looking at a brown dwarf here rather than a gas giant like Jupiter, for TYC 8998-760-1 b is about 14 times Jupiter's mass, nudging into brown dwarf territory, and it appears to be roughly three times as large, unusual for brown dwarfs. The planet's separation from its host star is pegged at 160 AU. An inflated atmosphere due to processes still unknown? We don't know, but both this and the companion planet have been directly imaged. Now TYC 8998-760-1 b resurfaces through work with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, as reported in the latest issue of Nature. Led by first author Yapeng Zhang (Leiden University, The Netherlands), the team of astronomers detected carbon isotopes in the object's atmosphere, showing higher than expected carbon-13 content. Here is the image, first...

Demonstrating once again the role amateurs can play in supporting ongoing observations, a new project linking NASA and the American Association of Variable Star Observers is being launched. Exoplanet Watch isn't about discovering new transiting planets (although the potential is there) as much as tightening up the information we already have about planets currently under investigation. The idea is to help professional observers know when to look, which allows them to maximize precious observing time on instruments that are always in high demand. Transit timing is the key, and the fact is that for many known exoplanets, knowing exactly when to look is problematic. Rob Zellem (JPL) is project lead for Exoplanet Watch: "If there's a 15-minute under-estimate of when a transit will occur, that's an extra 15 minutes I have to build into my observing scenario. Time on big telescopes, especially space telescopes, is very, very precious. If you're observing a lot of planets, [15 minutes]...

Many of the planet-hosting stars being identified by TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, may actually be binaries. Unless examined closely, a pair of stars can appear as a single object, requiring high resolution instrumentation to separate into its component parts. As it applies to exoplanet research, this is a problem, for TESS operates by the transit method, tracking the change in a star’s light curve as a planet crosses the face of the star. Light curves yield precious information, but the presence of a second star unknown to researchers can obscure smaller, rocky worlds, just the kind of object we’d like to eventually identify as an Earth 2.0. The problem seems to be wider than we have realized, given that about half of all stars exist in binary systems. New work has put some numbers on the problem. Conducted with data from the Gemini Observatory and the WIYN 3.5-meter telescope at Kitt Peak by NASA Ames researchers, the study examined TESS host stars using a...

Nu2 Lupi is a G-class star not all that far away in astronomical terms (48 light years) in the constellation Lupus, its proximity verified by parallax measurements and firmed up by the Hipparcos satellite. This is one of the closest G-class stars to our own, and it’s a fast mover in other ways, with a high radial velocity. Its age is estimated at roughly 12 billion years, making it one of the oldest stars near our system. HARPS spectrograph data pulled up three planets here in 2019, two of them later found to transit. And now we have, unexpectedly, a third transit. The surprising nature of the third relates to the distance of the third planet from the star. The two inner worlds, with masses between Earth’s and Neptune’s, take 12 and 28 days to orbit Nu2 Lupi. The third takes 107 days, far enough out that a transit seemed unlikely. The ratio of the diameter of the star to the diameter of the orbit comes into play in determining the probability of a transit. We have the European Space...

Call it the Earth Transit Zone, that region of space from which putative astronomers on an exoplanet could see the Earth transit the Sun. Lisa Kaltenegger (Cornell University) is director of the Carl Sagan Institute and the author of a 2020 paper with Joshua Pepper (LeHigh University) that examined the stars within the ETZ (see Seeing Earth as a Transiting World). While Kaltengger and Pepper identified 1004 main sequence stars within 100 parsecs that would see Earth as a transiting planet, Kaltenegger reminds us that stars are ever in motion. Given the abundant resources available in the European Space Agency's Gaia eDR3 catalog, why not work out positions and stellar motions to examine the question over time? After all, there are SETI implications here. We study planetary atmospheres using data taken during transits. Are we, in turn, the subject of such study from astronomers elsewhere in the cosmos? Thus Kaltenegger's new paper in Nature, written with Jackie Faherty (American...

The Allende meteorite is the largest carbonaceous chondrite meteorite ever discovered. Falling over Mexico's state of Chihuahua in 1969 and breaking up in the atmosphere, the object yielded over two tons of material that have provided fodder for scientists interested in the early days of the Solar System. The meteorite contains numerous calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions (CAIs), which are considered to be the first kind of solids formed in the system 4.5 billion years ago. Samples of the Allende meteorite are considered 'primitive,' which in this parlance means unaffected by significant alteration since formation. Now a team led by Tom Zega (University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory) has gone to work on a dust grain from this object, in order to simulate the conditions under which it formed in the Sun's protoplanetary disk. The grain was drawn from one of several CAIs discovered in the Allende meteorite sample. Analysis of the sample's chemistry and crystal structure...

As we learn more about how planetary systems form, it's becoming accepted that a large number of planets are being ejected from young systems because of their interactions with more massive worlds. I always referred to these as 'rogue planets' in previous articles on the subject, but a new paper from Patricio Javier Ávila (University of Concepción, Chile) and colleagues makes it clear that the term Free Floating Planet (FFP) is now widespread. A new acronym for us to master! There have been searches to try to constrain the number of free floating planets, though the suggested ranges are wide. Microlensing seems the best technique, as it can spot masses we cannot otherwise see through their effect on background starlight. Of these, the estimates come in at around 2 Jupiter-mass planets and 2.5 terrestrial-class rocky worlds per star that have been flung into the darkness. This is a vast number of planets, but we have to be wary of mass uncertainties, as the cut-off between...

The beauty of nearby M-dwarf stars for exoplanet research is the depth of transits. If we are fortunate enough to find a planet crossing the face of the star as seen from our observatory, the star's small size means a larger portion of its light will be attenuated. As you would imagine, this makes planets easier to spot, but the other significant advantage is that we have greater capability at analyzing the planet's atmosphere. TOI-1231b certainly fits the bill, although it's a bit of an anomaly in the TESS universe. The space observatory operates with a built in observational bias because the Science Processing Operations Center (SPOC) pipeline and the Quick Look Pipeline (QLP) that comb through TESS data on a 2-minute and 30 minute cadence respectively have to show two transits for the planet's period to be determined. Factor in that most of the TESS sky coverage is observed for 28 days and you wind up in the majority of cases with detections of planets with orbital periods of less...