Whether you are already a fan of Greek mythology or someone who only vaguely remembers Icarus from a long-forgotten school lesson, today’s Astrobite will show you that flying too close to the Sun (and its consequences) is more than a myth when it comes to extremely hot exoplanets.
We cannot travel back in time, but we can still try to reconstruct how planets evolved from the clues they leave behind today. In this Astrobite, we explore how L 98-59 d’s atmosphere and interior models reveal a molten world still being reshaped by its host star.
The geologic carbon cycle has been an important tool for balancing carbon dioxide and stabilizing the climate of Earth over billions of years. The authors of today’s bite explore why dry planets may be missing this critical climate-stabilizing thermostat.
Characterising exoplanet atmospheres is one of the primary challenges for the coming decades and absolutely essential for our understanding of these alien worlds. Join us today as we dive into some of the ways we can study these distant worlds from the comforts of our labs here on Earth.
Whether you’re a six-year-old scouring the backyard on Easter morning, or an exoplanet astronomer with observing time on the James Webb Space Telescope, nothing beats the feeling of finding what you’re looking for. So, you can imagine the authors of today’s paper were pretty excited when they received their transmission spectroscopy data of the sub-Neptune known as TOI-270d.
We follow recipes for perfect cocktails, but we have yet to discover the recipe for sub-Neptune exoplanets. Today’s bite explores how hydrogen and silicates mix inside these mysterious worlds and what this tells us about their structure and evolution.