International Year of Astronomy Invited Review on Exoplanets

Abstract

Just fourteen years ago the Solar System represented the only known planetary system in the Galaxy, and conceptions of planet formation were shaped by this sample of one. Since then, 320 planets have been discovered orbiting 276 individual stars. This large and growing ensemble of exoplanets has informed theories of planet formation, placed the Solar System in a broader context, and revealed many surprises along the way. In this review I provide an overview of what has been learned from studies of the occurrence, orbits and physical structures of planets. After taking a look back at how far the field has advanced, I will discuss some of the future directions of exoplanetary science, with an eye toward the detection and characterization of Earth-like planets around other stars.

5 pages, 4 figures, PASP in press (April 2009)

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Protoplanetary Disks and Their Evolution
• Imaging Extrasolar Giant Planets
• Retired A Stars and Their Companions. III. Comparing the Mass-Period Distributions of Planets Around A-Type Stars and Sun-Like Stars
• LHS6343C: A Transiting Field Brown Dwarf Discovered by the Kepler Mission
• Pixel-lensing as a way to detect extrasolar planets in M31
• The Late Stages of Protoplanetary Disk Evolution: A Millimeter Survey of Upper Scorpius
• The Posterior Distribution of sin(i) for Exoplanets with M_T sin(i) Determined from Radial Velocity Data
• Estimates of the Planet Yield from Ground-Based High-Contrast Imaging Observations as a Function of Stellar Mass
• Benchmark experiments with global climate models applicable to extra-solar gas giant planets in the shallow atmosphere approximation
• Observations of radio pulses from CU Virginis