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Related papers: A Distinct Population of Small Planets: Sub-Earths

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NASA's Kepler mission identified over 4000 extrasolar planets that transit (cross in front of) their host stars. This sample has revealed detailed features in the demographics of planet sizes and orbital spacings. However, knowledge of…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2025-07-11 Gregory J. Gilbert , Erik A. Petigura , Paige M. Entrican

NASA's TESS mission is expected to discover hundreds of M dwarf planets. However, few studies focus on how planets form around low-mass stars. We aim to better characterize the formation process of M dwarf planets to fill this gap and aid…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2021-03-17 Brianna Zawadzki , Daniel Carrera , Eric Ford

Previous work concerning planet formation around low-mass stars has often been limited to large planets and individual systems. As current surveys routinely detect planets down to terrestrial size in these systems, a more holistic approach…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2021-12-08 Remo Burn , Martin Schlecker , Christoph Mordasini , Alexandre Emsenhuber , Yann Alibert , Thomas Henning , Hubert Klahr , Willy Benz

Recent surveys have uncovered an exciting new population of ultra-short-period (USP) planets with orbital periods less than a day. These planets typically have radii <1.5 Earth radii, indicating that they likely have rocky compositions.…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2017-09-13 Eric D. Lopez

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…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2022-11-30 David Vallet , Anna C. Childs , Rebecca G. Martin , Mario Livio , Stephen Lepp

Sub-Neptune planets, with sizes and masses between those of Earth and Neptune, dominate the exoplanet population. Sub-Neptunes are expected to be the most diverse family of the exoplanet population, potentially including rocky gas dwarfs,…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2025-09-24 Nikku Madhusudhan , Måns Holmberg , Savvas Constantinou , Gregory J. Cooke

With the wealth of planets that have been discovered over the past $\sim$ 20 years, the field can broadly be divided into two regimes. For understanding broad occurrence and formation rates, large numbers of planets allow for population…

Popular Physics · Physics 2018-04-03 Michael B. Lund , Robert J. Siverd , Ponder Stibbons

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…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2022-12-28 Daria Kubyshkina , Luca Fossati

Small, close-in exoplanets are divided into two sub-populations: super-Earths and sub-Neptunes. Most super-Earths are thought to have lost their primordially accreted hydrogen-dominated atmospheres via thermally driven winds. We consider…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2024-05-31 James G. Rogers , Hilke E. Schlichting , Edward D. Young

The formation of gas giant planets is assumed to be preceded by the emergence of solid cores in the conventional sequential-accretion paradigm. This hypothesis implies that the presence of earth-like planets can be inferred from the…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-13 J. L. Zhou , S. J. Aarseth , D. N. C. Lin , M. Nagasawa

M dwarf stars are the most promising hosts for detection and characterization of small and potentially habitable planets, and provide leverage relative to solar-type stars to test models of planet formation and evolution. Using \emph{Gaia}…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2024-09-16 Eric Gaidos , Aleezah Ali , Adam L. Kraus , Jason F. Rowe

The Kepler Spacecraft has discovered a large number of planets up to one-year periods and down to terrestrial sizes. While the majority of the target stars are main-sequence dwarfs of spectral type F, G, and K, Kepler covers stars with…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2015-01-13 Gijs D. Mulders , Ilaria Pascucci , Daniel Apai

The increasing number of super-Earths close to their host stars revealed a scarcity of close-in small planets with 1.5-2.0$\,R_\oplus$ in the radius distribution of ${\it Kepler}$ planets. The atmospheric escape of super-Earths by…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2022-04-06 Naho Fujita , Yasunori Hori , Takanori Sasaki

The orbital period ratios of neighbouring sub-Neptunes are distributed asymmetrically near first-order resonances. There are deficits of systems---"troughs" in the period ratio histogram---just short of commensurability, and…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2020-05-27 Nick Choksi , Eugene Chiang

With improving methods and surveys, the young field of extrasolar planets has recently expanded into a qualitatively new domain - terrestrial (mostly rocky) planets. The first such planets were discovered during the past year, judging by…

Astrophysics · Physics 2008-11-26 Diana Valencia , Dimitar D. Sasselov , Rirchard J. O'Connell

Remnant planetesimals might have played an important role in reducing the orbital eccentricities of the terrestrial planets after their formation via giant impacts. However, the population and the size distribution of remnant planetesimals…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-13 Ryuji Morishima , Max W. Schmidt , Joachim Stadel , Ben Moore

The unexpected diversity of exoplanets includes a growing number of super-Earth planets, i.e., exoplanets with masses smaller than 10 Earth masses. Unlike the larger exoplanets previously found, these smaller planets are more likely to have…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-13 W. von Bloh , C. Bounama , M. Cuntz , S. Franck

In the last few years astronomical surveys have expanded the reach of planetary science into the realm of small and dense extrasolar worlds. These share a number of characteristics with the terrestrial and icy planetary objects of the Solar…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2024-09-20 Tim Lichtenberg , Yamila Miguel

The formation of super-Earths is strongly linked to the structure of the protoplanetary disc, which determines growth and migration. In the pebble accretion scenario, planets grow to the pebble isolation mass, at which the planet carves a…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2019-10-02 Bertram Bitsch

While the recent microlensing discoveries of super-Earths orbiting two M dwarf stars have been taken as support for the core accretion mechanism of giant planet formation, we show here that these planets could also have been formed by the…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-11 Alan P. Boss