rocky planets tagged posts

Nearly a decade after the discovery of LHS 1140b, a rocky exoplanet in the habitable zone of a nearby low-mass star, a new study reveals that the object may have its own atmosphere.

University of Florida Assistant Professor of Astronomy Jason Dittmann first discovered the planet in 2016. Now, he is a co-author of the new study, published in Science, that uses helium escape to explain a potential atmosphere.

“The exciting part about this paper, and why I think it was accepted into Science, was that this is the first time that we’re seeing a rocky, Earth-like planet that could still have an atmosphere,” Dittmann said.

How the planet was found
The Magellan Clay telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile showed evidence of helium escaping from the planet...

Scientists unveil a unified theory for rocky planet formation. A new theory for how rocky planets form could explain the origin of so-called “super-Earths” – a class of exoplanets a few times more massive than the Earth that are the most abundant type of planet in the galaxy.

Further, it could explain why super-Earths within a single planetary system often wind up looking strangely similar in size, as though each system were only capable of producing a single kind of planet.

“As our observations of exoplanets have grown over the past decade, it has become clear that the standard theory of planet formation needs to be revised, starting with the fundamentals...

Artistic simulation of a planetary system composed by three rocky planets with the same size of the Earth. Credit: Gabriel Pérez Díaz, SMM (IAC)

Today marks the discovery of two new planetary systems, one of them hosting three planets with the same size of the Earth. The information about these new exoplanets has been obtained from the data collected by the K2 mission of NASA’s Kepler satellite, which started in November 2013. The work, which will be published in the Monthly Notices of the magazine Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), reveals the existence of two new planetary systems detected from the eclipses they produce in the stellar light of their respective stars...

New planet candidates from the eighth Kepler planet candidate catalog show numerous terrestrial worlds that are near the size of Earth and within the habitable zone of their stars. The dark green span represents an optimistic estimate for habitable zone, while the brighter green a more conservative estimate. Blue circles are confirmed exoplanets, while yellow circles are new planet candidates that require follow-up observations. Credit: NASA/Ames Research Center/Wendy Stenzel

Rocky planets are probably a whole lot more common in our galaxy than astronomers previously believed—according to the latest release of Kepler Space Telescope data last week—a scenario that enhances the prospects for extraterrestrial life in nearby solar systems...