Related papers: Inevitability of Plate Tectonics on Super-Earths
Super-Earths with orbital periods less than 100 days are extremely abundant around Sun-like stars. It is unlikely that these planets formed at their current locations. Rather, they likely formed at large distances from the star and…
The radial density of planets increases with depth due to compressibility, leading to impacts on their convective dynamics. To account for these effects, including the presence of a quasi-adiabatic temperature profile and entropy sources…
Stellar activity and planetary atmospheric properties have the potential to strongly influence habitability. To date, neither have been adequately studied in the multiverse context, so there has been no assessment of how these effects…
Models of thermal evolution, crustal production, and CO$_2$ cycling are used to constrain the prospects for habitability of rocky planets, with Earth-like size and composition, in the stagnant lid regime. Specifically, we determine the…
The discovery of planets orbiting stars other than the Sun has accelerated over the past decade, and this trend will continue as new space- and ground-based observatories employ next-generation instrumentation to search the skies for…
From the numerous detected planets outside the Solar system, no terrestrial planet comparable to our Earth has been discovered so far. The search for an Exo-Earth is certainly a big challenge which may require the detections of planetary…
Super-Earths are the most abundant planets known to date and are characterized by having sizes between that of Earth and Neptune, typical orbital periods of less than 100 days and gaseous envelopes that are often massive enough to…
As the number of detected rocky extrasolar planets increases, the question of whether their surfaces could be habitable is becoming more pertinent. On Earth, the long-term carbonate silicate cycle is able to regulate surface temperatures…
The discovery of close-to-star gas-giant exo-planets lends support to the idea of Earth's origin as a Jupiter-like gas giant and to the consequences of its compression, including whole-Earth decompression dynamics that gives rise, without…
Planet formation models have been developed during the last years in order to try to reproduce the observations of both the solar system, and the extrasolar planets. Some of these models have partially succeeded, focussing however on…
Recent observations have found a valley in the size distribution of close-in super-Earths that is interpreted as a signpost that close-in super-Earths are mostly rocky in composition. However, new models predict that planetesimals should…
The carbon-silicate cycle regulates the atmospheric $CO_2$ content of terrestrial planets on geological timescales through a balance between the rates of $CO_2$ volcanic outgassing and planetary intake from rock weathering. It is thought to…
With the progress of detection techniques, the number of low-mass and small-size exoplanets is increasing rapidly. However their characteristics and formation mechanisms are not yet fully understood. The metallicity of the host star is a…
The sizes of small planets have been known to be bi-modal, with a gap separating planets that have lost their primordial atmospheres (super-Earths), and the ones that retain them (mini-Neptunes). Here, we report evidences for another…
Habitability is usually defined as the requirement for a terrestrial planet's atmosphere to sustain liquid water. This definition can be complemented by the dynamical requirement that other planets in the system do not gravitationally…
The search for habitable planets like Earth around other stars fulfils an ancient imperative to understand our origins and place in the cosmos. The past decade has seen the discovery of hundreds of planets, but nearly all are gas giants…
Our understanding of the processes that are relevant to the formation and maintenance of habitable planetary systems is advancing at a rapid pace, both from observation and theory. The present review focuses on recent research that bears on…
We suggest a model that describes a mutual dynamic of tectonic plates. The dynamic is a sort of stick-slip one which is modeled by a Markov random process. The process defines a microlevel of the dynamic. A macrolevel is obtained by a…
While giant planet occurrence rates increase with stellar mass, occurrence rates of close-in super-Earths decrease. This is in contradiction to the expectation that the total mass of the planets in a system scale with the protoplanetary…
Determining which rocky exoplanets have atmospheres, and why, is a key goal for the James Webb Space Telescope. So far, emission observations of individual rocky exoplanets orbiting M stars (M-Earths) have not provided definitive evidence…