WASP-47b: A Hot Jupiter with Friends
What might be the strangest architecture yet of an exoplanetary system was discovered, and it raises big questions as to how planetary systems form and evolve.
UR #17: Finding Transiting Planets With LSST
This month’s undergraduate research post features a student who looked at how well LSST will be able to detect transiting exoplanets. Read on to find out what she learned!
Extreme Makeover: Exoplanet Edition
The past 20 years of exoplanet discovery have unveiled many peculiar planets in the Milky Way. Today’s paper investigates if two classes of these odd planets could be the same planet at different points in their evolutionary history – if hot Jupiters can transform into super-Earths!
Hot Jupiters Are Very Bad Neighbors
Hot Jupiters are weird and lonely. Is gravitational perturbation to blame?
Habitable Moons at the Ice Line?
Those of us who love astrobiology get really worked up about the lack of Earth-sized exoplanets found at Earth-like distances from their stars. All we want, we who hope for lots of extraterrestrial life, is a bunch of Earth-like planets doing Earth-like things so we can feel better about the odds for lots of Earth-like life in the universe.
Can Scattering Explain Eccentric Planets?
New dynamical simulations show that close-in planets on eccentric orbits can arise from planet-planet scattering — but only if the scattering occurs on larger orbits and is followed by inward migration.