Related papers: Soot Planets instead of Water Worlds
A persistent question in exoplanet demographics is whether exoplanetary systems form from similar compositional building blocks to our own. Polluted white dwarf stars offer a unique way to address this question as they provide measurements…
Future direct-imaging exoplanet missions such as WFIRST/AFTA, Exo-C, and Exo-S will measure the reflectivity of exoplanets at visible wavelengths. The exoplanets to be observed will be located further away from their parent stars than is…
Of the many recently discovered terrestrial exoplanets, some are expected to harbor moderate water mass fractions of a few percent. The formation pathways that can produce planets with these water mass fractions are not fully understood.…
Clouds are an integral part of planetary atmospheres, with most planets hosting clouds. The understanding of not only the formation, but also the composition of clouds is crucial to the understanding of future observations. As observations…
As part of a national scientific network 'Pathways to Habitability' the formation of planets and the delivery of water onto these planets is a key question as water is essential for the development of life. In the first part of the paper we…
Most models of volatile delivery to accreting terrestrial planets assume that the carriers for water are similar in water content to the carbonaceous chondrites in our Solar System. Here we suggest that the water content of primitive bodies…
`Hot jupiters,' giant planets with orbits very close to their parent stars, are thought to form farther away and migrate inward via interactions with a massive gas disk. If a giant planet forms and migrates quickly, the planetesimal…
A free-floating planet is a planetary-mass object that orbits around a non-stellar massive object (e.g. a brown dwarf) or around the Galactic Center. The presence of exomoons orbiting free-floating planets has been theoretically predicted…
Lava worlds are a potential emerging population of Super-Earths that are on close-in orbits around their host stars with likely partially molten mantles. To date, few studies address the impact of magma on the observed properties of a…
Observational surveys for extrasolar planets probe the diverse outcomes of planet formation and evolution. These surveys measure the frequency of planets with different masses, sizes, orbital characteristics, and host star properties. Small…
With more than 260 extrasolar planetary systems discovered to-date, the search for habitable planets has found new grounds. Unlike our solar system, the stars of many of these planets are hosts to eccentric or close-in giant bodies. Several…
Extrasolar planetary host stars are enriched in key planet-building elements. These enrichments have the potential to drastically alter the building blocks available for terrestrial planet formation. Here we report on the combination of…
A habitable exoplanet is a world that can maintain stable liquid water on its surface. Techniques and approaches to characterizing such worlds are essential, as performing a census of Earth-like planets that may or may not have life will…
We explore two ways in which objects of planetary masses can form. One is in disk systems like the solar system. The other is in dense clusters where stars and brown dwarfs form. We do not yet have the instrumental accuracy to detect…
Exoplanet exploration has revealed that many$\unicode{x2013}$perhaps most$\unicode{x2013}$terrestrial exoplanets formed with substantial H$_2$-rich envelopes, seemingly in contrast to solar system terrestrials, for which there is scant…
Differentiation in terrestrial planets is expected to include the formation of a metallic iron core. We predict the existence of terrestrial planets that have differentiated but have no metallic core--planets that are effectively a giant…
Liquid water is a critical component of habitability. However, the production and stability of surficial liquid water can be challenging on planets outside the Habitable Zone and devoid of adequate greenhouse warming. On such cold, icy…
We investigate the chemical composition of the solar system's giant planets atmospheres using a physical formation model with chemistry. The model incorporate disk evolution, pebbles and gas accretion, type I and II migration, simplified…
Characterizing the atmospheres of extrasolar planets is the new frontier in exoplanetary science. The last two decades of exoplanet discoveries have revealed that exoplanets are very common and extremely diverse in their orbital and bulk…
Despite surface liquid water's importance to habitability, observationally diagnosing its presence or absence on exoplanets is still an open problem. Inspired within the Solar System by the differing sulfur cycles on Venus and Earth, we…