The First Exoplanet Discovery (Around a Very Non-Sunlike Star)
Today’s classic paper summary covers the first exoplanet discovery- a pulsar planet!
Honey, I shrunk the orbit!
Today’s post describes the discovery of Kepler’s first planet candidate spiraling into its star!
History lessons from chemical elements
Chemical elements are pretty good history teachers! Today’s paper describes how chemical abundances can tell us about the history of where a planet formed.
Icy Dead Zones: Birthplaces of Super-Earths?
The number of super-Earths with small semimajor axis appears to decrease with the mass of the host star. How can this be, if more massive stars have more massive protoplanetary disks and thus more material to build planets from? An icy dead zone may be the answer to this riddle!
Biases from Bulging Planets
We usually assume that all exoplanets are perfectly round. Today’s authors wonder: what are we getting wrong if some are slightly squished?
A Smoggy Day on a Young Exoplanet
Transmission spectroscopy shows /
no gases or features, although /
whether sunspots or hazes /
or both (how in blazes?) /
this atmosphere’s spectrum is sloped!