We've been looking at circumstellar disks for quite some time, and teasing out images of actual planets within them, as witness HR 8799, where four exoplanets have been found. Just recently we saw imagery of a second world around PDS 70, both planets seen by direct...
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Hunting for Exoplanet Moons
We're all interested in transiting planets smaller than the Neptune-sized Gliese 436b, and sure to find many of them as our methods improve. One day soon, via missions like COROT or the upcoming Kepler, we'll be studying planets close to Earth mass and speculating on...
A New Search Space for Exomoons?
Given our recent discussion of exomoon candidate Kepler-1708 b-i, a possible moon 2.6 times the mass of Earth orbiting a gas giant, I want to be sure to work in Miki Nakajima’s work on how moons form. Nakajima (University of Rochester) is first author of the paper...
Exomoons: The Binary Star Factor
Centauri Dreams readers will remember Billy Quarles’ name in connection with a 2019 paper on Alpha Centauri A and B, which examined not just those stars but binary systems in general in terms of obliquity -- axial tilt -- on potential planets as affected by the...
Exploring Tidal Heating in Large Moons
Io, Jupiter’s large, inner Galilean moon, is the very definition of a tortured surface, as seen in the image below, taken by the Galileo spacecraft in 1997. Discovering volcanic activity -- and plenty of it -- on Io was one of the early Voyager surprises, even if it...
WFIRST: Exoplanets in the Direction of Galactic Center
The Kepler mission gave us, along with plenty of exoplanetary scenarios, a statistical look at a particular patch of sky, one containing parts of Lyra, Cygnus and Draco. Some of the stars within that field were close (Gliese 1245 is just 15 light years out), but the...
An Encouraging Formation Scenario for Icy Moons
It makes sense that planets in other stellar systems would have moons, but so far it has been difficult to find them. That's why Kepler-1625b, about 8,000 light years out in the direction of Cygnus, is so interesting. As we noted last month, David Kipping and graduate...
Probing Exoplanet Obliquity
It's always a shock for me when the soft air and fecund smells of spring slam into a parched and baked July, but seasonal change is inevitable. At least it is on Earth. We get such seasonal changes because of Earth's obliquity, the angle of its spin axis relative to...
On Potentially Habitable Moons
Looking through a recent Astrophysical Journal paper on gas giants in the habitable zone of their stars, I found myself being diverted by the distinction between a conservative habitable zone (CHZ) and a somewhat more optimistic one (OHZ). Let's pause briefly on this,...
Extracting Exoplanet Topography from Transit Data
How do we go from seeing an exoplanet as a dip on a light curve or even a single pixel on an image to a richly textured world, with oceans, continents and, perhaps, life? We've got a long way to go in this effort, but we're already having success at studying exoplanet...