“We have just raised the probability that many rocky planets are like the Earth, and there’s a very large number of rocky planets in the universe,” said Edward Young, UCLA professor of geochemistry and cosmochemistry. “We’re studying geochemistry in rocks from other stars, which is almost unheard of.”
There is an as-yet-unseen population of Jupiter-like planets orbiting nearby Sun-like stars, awaiting discovery by future missions like NASA’s WFIRST space telescope, according to new models of gas giant planet formation by observational astronomer Alan Boss, supported by a new Science paper on the surprising discovery of a gas giant planet orbiting a low-mass star. Boss’s work focuses on the Astrometric Planet Search project, which has been underway for the last decade at Carnegie Institute’s Las Campanas Observatory in Chile..
K2-18b, which is eight times the mass of Earth, is now the only exoplanet known to have both water and temperatures that could support life. The discovery is the first successful atmospheric detection for an exoplanet orbiting in its star’s ‘habitable zone’, at a distance where water can exist in liquid form.
“While the current wave of research is going towards habitability and biosignatures, our signature is a signature of destruction,” astrophysicist Apurva Oza at the Physics Institute of the University of Bern about the detection of an “exo-moon” hidden at the exoplanet system WASP-49b that appears to be an extreme version of Jupiter’s moon Io –the volcanic epicenter of our solar system. “A few of these worlds could be destroyed in a few billion years due to the extreme mass loss. The exciting part is that we can monitor these destructive processes in real time, like fireworks.”
Using data from the Spitzer Space and the Hubble Space telescopes, a new study by astronomers from the McGill Space Institute has found that the temperature on the nightsides of different hot Jupiters is surprisingly uniform at about 800°C, suggesting the dark side of these massive gaseous planets have clouds made of minerals and rocks.
