New Worlds on the Horizon: Earth-Sized Planets Close to Other Stars

Abstract

The search for habitable planets like Earth around other stars fulfils an ancient imperative to understand our origins and place in the cosmos. The past decade has seen the discovery of hundreds of planets, but nearly all are gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn. Recent advances in instrumentation and new missions are extending searches to planets the size of the Earth, but closer to their host stars. There are several possible ways such planets could form, and future observations will soon test those theories. Many of these planets we discover may be quite unlike Earth in their surface temperature and composition, but their study will nonetheless inform us about the process of planet formation and the frequency of Earth-like planets around other stars.

arXiv commentto appear in Science, October 12, 2007

References in corpus (25)

• SparsePak: A Formatted Fiber Field Unit for The WIYN Telescope Bench Spectrograph. I. Design, Construction, and Calibration
• Planetary Radii across Five Orders of Magnitude in Mass and Stellar Insolation: Application to Transits
• DHP Framework: Digital Health Passports Using Blockchain -- Use case on international tourism during the COVID-19 pandemic
• On detecting terrestrial planets with timing of giant planet transits
• A ~ 7.5 Earth-Mass Planet Orbiting the Nearby Star, GJ 876
• Making other Earths: Dynamical Simulations of Terrestrial Planet Formation and Water Delivery
• An extrasolar planetary system with three Neptune-mass planets
• Migration and the formation of systems of hot super-Earths and Neptunes
• A New Family of Planets ? "Ocean Planets"
• Radial Velocity Jitter in Stars from the California and Carnegie Planet Search at Keck Observatory
• The HARPS search for southern extra-solar planets XI. Super-Earths (5 & 8 M_Earth) in a 3-planet system
• Halting Type I planet migration in non-isothermal disks
• Exotic Earths: Forming Habitable Worlds with Giant Planet Migration
• On the migration of protogiant solid cores
• Volatile-Rich Earth-Mass Planets in the Habitable Zone
• Formation of Earth-like Planets During and After Giant Planet Migration
• Terrestrial Planet Formation in Disks with Varying Surface Density Profiles
• Planets Formed in Habitable Zones of M Dwarf Stars Probably are Deficient in Volatiles
• Origin and Ubiquity of Short-Period Earth-like Planets: Evidence for the Sequential-Accretion Theory of Planet Formation
• A limit on the presence of Earth-mass planets around a Sun-like star
• Oligarchic and giant impact growth of terrestrial planets in the presence of gas giant planet migration
• Formation and structure of the three Neptune-mass planets system around HD69830
• Exoplanet detection capability of the COROT space mission
• Massive Protoplanetary Disks in the Trapezium Region
• On the potential of extrasolar planet transit surveys

Cited by in corpus (21)

• Hydrogen Greenhouse Planets Beyond the Habitable Zone
• A Spectroscopic Catalog of the Brightest (J<9) M Dwarfs in the Northern Sky
• An All-Sky Catalog of Bright M Dwarfs
• Prospecting in late-type dwarfs: a calibration of infrared and visible spectroscopic metallicities of late-K and M dwarfs spanning 1.5 dex
• Geodynamics and Rate of Volcanism on Massive Earth-like Planets
• Observable Consequences of Planet Formation Models in Systems with Close-in Terrestrial Planets
• No universal minimum-mass extrasolar nebula: Evidence against in-situ accretion of systems of hot super-Earths
• They might be giants: luminosity class, planet frequency, and planet-metallicity relation of the coolest Kepler target stars
• The Roles of Tidal Evolution and Evaporative Mass Loss in the Origin of CoRoT-7 b
• Objects in Kepler's Mirror May be Larger Than They Appear: Bias and Selection Effects in Transiting Planet Surveys
• Thermodynamic Limits on Magnetodynamos in Rocky Exoplanets
• The Compositional Diversity of Extrasolar Terrestrial Planets: II. Migration Simulations
• CoRoT-7 b: Super-Earth or Super-Io?
• Stellar Characterization of M-dwarfs from the APOGEE Survey: A Calibrator Sample for the M-dwarf Metallicities
• The detectability of habitable exomoons with Kepler
• The Near-Ultraviolet Luminosity Function of Young, Early M-Type Dwarf Stars
• Formation and Detection of Earth Mass Planets around Low Mass Stars
• On the Nature of Small Planets around the Coolest Kepler Stars
• Terrestrial Planet Formation in Extra-Solar Planetary Systems
• Kinematics And Ellipsoidal Motion Of The Mid To Late M-Type Stars
• Habitable Zones for Earth-mass Planets in Multiple Planetary Systems