Related papers: Are mirror planets opaque?
Measuring the albedo of an extrasolar planet provides insights into its atmospheric composition and its global thermal properties, including heat dissipation and weather patterns. Such a measurement requires very precise photometry of a…
Recent studies regarding the habitability, observability, and possible orbital evolution of the indirectly detected exoplanet Proxima b have mostly assumed a planet with $M \sim 1.3$ $M_\oplus$, a rocky composition, and an Earth-like…
Small planets ($\sim$1--3.9 $\Rearth$) constitute more than half of the inventory of the 4000-plus exoplanets discovered so far. Smaller planets are sufficiently dense to be rocky, but those with radii larger than $\sim$1.6 $\Rearth$ are…
Transiting extrasolar planets are key objects in the study of the formation, migration, and evolution of planetary systems. In particular, the exploration of the atmospheres of giant planets, through transmission spectroscopy or direct…
We report the discovery of a planetary system in which a super-earth orbits a late M-dwarf host. The planetary system was found from the analysis of the microlensing event OGLE-2017-BLG-0482, wherein the planet signal appears as a…
The extra-solar planet HD209458b has been found to have an extended atmosphere of escaping atomic hydrogen (Vidal-Madjar et al. 2003), suggesting that ``hot Jupiters'' closer to their parent stars could evaporate. Here we estimate the…
In order to characterize giant exoplanets and better understand their origin, knowledge of how the planet's composition depends on its mass and stellar environment is required. In this work, we simulate the thermal evolution of gaseous…
We investigate compact objects formed by dark matter admixed with ordinary matter made of neutron star matter and white dwarf material. We consider non-self annihilating dark matter with an equation-of-state given by an interacting Fermi…
Context. The extremely low density of several long-period exoplanets in mature systems is still unexplained -- with HIP 41378 f being archetypical of this category. It has been proposed that such planets could actually have normal densities…
An intriguing pattern among exoplanets is the lack of detected planets between approximately $1.5$ R$_\oplus$ and $2.0$ R$_\oplus$. One proposed explanation for this "radius gap" is the photoevaporation of planetary atmospheres, a theory…
The transiting exoplanet HD 149026b is an important case for theories of planet formation and planetary structure, because the planet's relatively small size has been interpreted as evidence for a highly metal-enriched composition. We…
Obliquity tides are a potentially important source of heat for extrasolar planets on close-in orbits. Although tidal dissipation will usually reduce the obliquity to zero, a nonzero obliquity can persist if the planet is in a Cassini state,…
Transiting planets manifest themselves by a periodic dimming of their host star by a fixed amount. On the other hand, light curves of transiting circumbinary (CB) planets are expected to be neither periodic nor to have a single depth while…
We investigate the effect of planetary rotation on the transit spectrum of an extrasolar giant planet. During ingress and egress, absorption features arising from the planet's atmosphere are Doppler shifted by of order the planet's…
Various mechanisms have been proposed to explain the inflated size of HD 209458b after it became clear that it has no companions capable of producing a stellar reflex velocity greater than around 5 m/s. Had there been such a companion, the…
Main-sequence stars earlier than spectral type ~F6 or so are expected to rotate rapidly due to their radiative exteriors. This rapid rotation leads to an oblate stellar figure. It also induces the photosphere to be hotter (by up to several…
Over the past three decades instruments on the ground and in space have discovered thousands of planets outside the solar system. These observations have given rise to an astonishingly detailed picture of the demographics of short-period…
Exoplanet research focusing on the characterization of super-Earths is currently limited to those handful targets orbiting bright stars that are amenable to detailed study. This Letter proposes to look at alternative avenues to probe the…
Most extrasolar planets have been detected by their influence on their parent star, typically either gravitationally (the Doppler method) or by the small dip in brightness as the planet blocks a portion of the star (the transit method).…
Free-floating planets are a new class of planets recently discovered. These planets don't orbit within stellar systems, instead living a nomadic life within the galaxy. How such objects formed remains elusive. Numerous works have explored…