by Jaime Green | Feb 11, 2015 | Daily Paper Summaries
Could the properties of an M-dwarf that might make it inhospitable also give it transformative powers? Could the star’s gravity and violence strip away a planet’s thick atmosphere, or envelope, to reveal a habitable core?
by Jaime Green | Dec 31, 2014 | Daily Paper Summaries
Super-Earths could form close-in to their stars… but what about their atmospheres?
by Jaime Green | Aug 13, 2014 | Daily Paper Summaries
Of all the kinds of planets we’re finding around other stars—hot Jupiters and mini-Neptunes and those dubiously called “Earth-like”—super-Earths orbiting close to their stars are among the most abundant. While planets so close to their stars are poor candidates for habitability, they are important to understanding the possibility of other habitable planets in these seemingly common systems.
by Nick Ballering | Feb 3, 2014 | Daily Paper Summaries
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.