Related papers: CoRoT-7 b: Super-Earth or Super-Io?
Io and Jupiter constitute a moon-planet system that is unique in our solar system. Io is the most volcanically active planetary body, while Jupiter is the first among the planets in terms of size, mass, magnetic field strength, spin rate,…
Observations of giant stars indicate that the frequency of giant planets is much higher for intermediate-mass stars than for solar-like stars. Up to now all known planets of giant stars orbit at relatively far distances from their host…
We report the discovery and confirmation of Kepler-7b, a transiting planet with unusually low density. The mass is less than half that of Jupiter, Mp = 0.43 Mj, but the radius is fifty percent larger, Rp = 1.48 Rj. The resulting density,…
The TRAPPIST-1 system is remarkable for its seven planets that are similar in size, mass, density, and stellar heating to the rocky planets Venus, Earth, and Mars in our own Solar System (Gillon et al. 2017). All TRAPPIST-1 planets have…
We present the discovery of Qatar-7b --- a very hot and inflated giant gas planet orbiting close its parent star. The host star is a relatively massive main sequence F-star with mass and radius Mstar = 1.41 +/- 0.03 Msun and Rstar = 1.56…
The CoRoT satellite has announced its fourth transiting planet (Aigrain et al. 2008) with space photometry. We describe and analyse complementary observations of this system performed to establish the planetary nature of the transiting body…
Simulations predict that hot super-Earth sized exoplanets can have their envelopes stripped by photo-evaporation, which would present itself as a lack of these exoplanets. However, this absence in the exoplanet population has escaped a firm…
Small planets, 1-4x the size of Earth, are extremely common around Sun-like stars, and surprisingly so, as they are missing in our solar system. Recent detections have yielded enough information about this class of exoplanets to begin…
CoRoT was the first space mission dedicated to exoplanet detection. Operational between 2007 and 2012, this mission discovered 37 transiting planets, including CoRoT-7b, the first terrestrial exoplanet with a measured size. The precision of…
Kepler's observation shows that many of the detected planets are super-Earths. They are inside a range of critical masses overlapping the core masses (2-20 $M_{\bigoplus}$), which would trigger the runaway accretion and develop the gas…
Ariel will mark the dawn of a new era as the first large-scale survey characterising exoplanetary atmospheres with science objectives to address fundamental questions about planetary composition, evolution and formation. In this study, we…
Exoplanets, short for `extra solar planets', are planets outside our solar system. They are objects with masses less than around 15 Jupiter-masses that orbit stars other than the Sun. They are small enough so they can not burn deuterium in…
In this paper we propose a new mechanism that could explain the survival of hydrogen atmospheres on some hot super-Earths. We argue that on close-orbiting tidally-locked super-Earths the tidal forces with the orbital and rotational…
Atmospheric abundances are thought to constrain the planet formation pathway, because different species evaporate at different temperatures leaving distinct signatures in the accreted atmosphere. The planetary C/O ratio is thought to…
The discovery of over 200 extrasolar planets with the radial velocity (RV) technique has revealed that many giant planets have large eccentricities, in striking contrast with most of the planets in the solar system and prior theories of…
Nearly 30 years after the discovery of the first exoplanet around a main sequence star, thousands of planets have now been confirmed. These discoveries have completely revolutionized our understanding of planetary systems, revealing types…
We report the discovery of KELT-10b, the first transiting exoplanet discovered using the KELT-South telescope. KELT-10b is a highly inflated sub-Jupiter mass planet transiting a relatively bright $V = 10.7$ star (TYC 8378-64-1), with…
The chemical abundances of gas-giant exoplanet atmospheres hold clues to the formation and evolution pathways that sculpt the exoplanet population. Recent ground-based high-resolution spectroscopic observations of the non-transiting hot…
The unexpected diversity of exoplanets includes a growing number of super- Earth planets, i.e., exoplanets with masses of up to several Earth masses and a similar chemical and mineralogical composition as Earth. We present a thermal…
Radial velocity (RV) surveys have discovered giant exoplanets on au-scale orbits with a broad distribution of eccentricities. Those with the most eccentric orbits are valuable laboratories for testing theories of high eccentricity…