Related papers: Planets: Power Laws and Classification
This chapter reviews the most recent advancements on the topic of terrestrial and giant planet interiors, including Solar System and extrasolar objects. Starting from an observed mass-radius diagram for known planets in the Universe, we…
The extent to which a magnetosphere protects its planetary atmosphere from stellar wind ablation depends upon how well it prevents energy and momentum exchange with the atmosphere and how well it traps otherwise escaping plasma. We focus on…
All planets and stars rotate. All gas planets in our solar system, the Sun, and many stars show a pattern of east- or westward mean flows. This phenomenon is known as differential rotation in the stellar and as zonal jets in the planetary…
I present an homogeneous determination of the physical properties of 14 transiting extrasolar planetary systems for which good data are available. The input quantities for each system are the results of the light curve analyses (Paper 1),…
Revealing the true nature of the gas giant planets in our Solar System is challenging. The masses of Jupiter and Saturn are about 318 and 95 Earth masses, respectively. While they mostly consist of hydrogen and helium, the total mass and…
In this chapter we summarize current knowledge of the internal structure of giant planets. We concentrate on the importance of heavy elements and their role in determining the planetary composition and internal structure, in planet…
A law of semi-major axes in the Solar system is described. The proposed law is recommended as an additional criterion for planet definition as it represents a generating function of planetary distances.
In principle, the combined measurements of the mass and radius a giant exoplanet allow one to determine the relative fraction of hydrogen and helium and of heavy elements in the planet. However, uncertainties on the underlying physics imply…
Variational techniques have been used in applications of hydrodynamics in special cases but an action that is general enough to deal with both potential flows and solid-body flows, such as cylindrical Couette flow and rotating planets, has…
Astrophysical observations reveal a large diversity of radii and masses of exoplanets. It is important to characterize the interiors of exoplanets to understand planetary diversity and further determine how unique, or not, Earth is.…
We employ planetary evolution modeling to reproduce the MR distribution of the 198 so far detected planets with mass and radius measured to the <45% and <15% level, respectively, and less massive than 108Me. We simultaneously account for…
While thousands of exoplanets have been confirmed, the known properties about individual discoveries remain sparse and depend on detection technique. To utilize more than a small section of the exoplanet dataset, tools need to be developed…
The satellite COROT will search for close-in exo-planets around a few thousand stars using the transit search method. The COROT mission holds the promise of detecting numerous exo-planets. Together with radial velocity follow-up…
As a planet transits the face of a star, it accelerates along the line-of-sight. The changing delay in the propagation of photons produces an apparent deceleration of the planet across the sky throughout the transit. This persistent…
The ''radius valley" is a relative dearth of planets between two potential populations of exoplanets, super-Earths and mini-Neptunes. This feature appears in examining the distribution of planetary radii, but has only ever been…
Critical gravitational collapse and self similarity are used to probe the mass distribution of subsolar objects. We demonstrate that at very low mass the distribution is given by a power law, with an exponent opposite in sign to that…
The number of extrasolar planets discovered is increasing, so that more than five thousand exoplanets have been confirmed to date. Now we have an opportunity to test the validity of the laws governing planetary systems and take steps to…
We use new interior models of cold planets to investigate the mass-radius relationships of solid exoplanets, considering planets made primarily of iron, silicates, water, and carbon compounds. We find that the mass-radius relationships for…
All extra-solar planet masses that have been derived spectroscopically are lower limits since the inclination of the orbit to our line-of-sight is unknown except for transiting systems. It is, however, possible to determine the inclination…
The prospects for finding transiting exoplanets in the range of a few to 20 Earth masses is growing rapidly with both ground-based and spaced-based efforts. We describe a publicly available computer code to compute and quantify the…