相关论文: MO0NFALL: The Great Filter and Exo-Moon Occurrence
The exoplanet detection is the most exciting and challenging field of astronomy. The discovery of many exoplanets has revolutionized our understanding of the formation and evolution of planetary systems and has showed new ways to search for…
The ubiquity of worlds beyond our Solar System confounds us.
We have found many Earth-sized worlds but we have no way of determining if their surfaces are Earth-like. This makes it impossible to quantitatively compare habitability, and pretending we can risks damaging the field.
Almost all the planets of our solar system have moons. Each planetary system has however unique characteristics. The Martian system has not one single big moon like the Earth, not tens of moons of various sizes like for the giant planets,…
For much of human history we have wondered how our solar system formed, and whether there are any other planets like ours around other stars. Only in the last 20 years have we had direct evidence for the existence of exoplanets, with the…
Exoplanet surveys have confirmed one of humanity's (and all teenagers') worst fears: we are weird. If our Solar System were observed with present-day Earth technology -- to put our system and exoplanets on the same footing -- Jupiter is the…
The architecture of exoplanetary systems is often different from the solar system, with some exoplanets being in close orbits around their host stars and having orbital periods of only a few days. In analogy to interactions between stars in…
The known population of exoplanets exhibits a much wider range of orbital eccentricities than Solar System planets and has a much higher average eccentricity. These facts have been widely interpreted to indicate that the Solar System is an…
Within the next few years, the first Earth-mass planets will be discovered around other stars. Some of those worlds will certainly lie within the classical "habitable zone" of their parent stars, and we will quickly move from knowing of no…
Extensive spectroscopic studies of stars with and without planets have concluded that stars hosting planets are significantly more metal-rich than those without planets. More subtle trends of different chemical elements begin to appear as…
Are microlensing searches likely to discover planets that harbor life? Given our present state of knowledge, this is a difficult question to answer. We therefore begin by asking a more narrowly focused question: are conditions on planets…
Recent studies have shown that large exomoons can form in the accretion disks around super-Jovian extrasolar planets. These planets are abundant at about 1 AU from Sun-like stars, which makes their putative moons interesting for studies of…
Cyclic activity on the Sun and stars is primarily explained by generation of the magnetic field by a dynamo mechanism, which converts the energy of the poloidal field into the energy of the toroidal component due to differential rotation.…
Recent observations suggest that many planetary-mass objects may be present in the outer solar system between the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud. Gravitational perturbations may occasionally bring them into the inner solar system. Their…
The magnetospheric emissions from extrasolar planets represent a science frontier for the next decade. All of the solar system giant planets and the Earth produce radio emissions as a result of interactions between their magnetic fields and…
The terrestrial and gas-giant planets in our solar system may represent some prototypes for planets around other stars; the exoplanets because most stars have similar overall elemental abundances as our sun. The solar system planets…
The giant impact hypothesis is the dominant theory explaining the formation of our Moon. However, its inability to produce an isotopically similar Earth-Moon system with correct angular momentum has cast a shadow on its validity.…
All-sky imaging surveys have identified several dozen isolated planetary-mass objects (IPMOs), far away from any star. Here, we examine the prospects for detecting transiting moons around these objects. We expect transiting moons to be…
An important goal within the quest for detecting an Earth-like extrasolar planet, will be to identify atmospheric gaseous bio-signatures. Observations of the light transmitted through the Earth's atmosphere, as for an extrasolar planet,…
Microlensing is a proven extrasolar planet search method that has already yielded the detection of four exoplanets. These detections have changed our understanding of planet formation ``beyond the snowline'' by demonstrating that…