Artist’s impression of the Kepler spacecraft. (credit: NASA)
Hard as it may be to imagine, before 1988, we hadn’t discovered a single planet (or exoplanet) outside our own Solar System. We had good reason to believe they existed, but no one had ever observed one in practice. So when astrophysicists at the time created models of the formation of planets in general, they had only one data point to base these models on: the Solar System. Consequently, these models tended to predict systems that look a lot like the Solar System.
The systems we actually ended up discovering threw researchers for a loop. Many had massive gas giants orbiting extremely close to their stars, earning the name “hot Jupiters.” Things like warm Neptunes and super-Earths soon followed. It became clear that exosolar systems could have drastically different histories and formation processes.
In a new study, a team of researchers analyzed data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft to learn more about the architecture of exosolar systems. Looking at 144 of them, the researchers identified a set that have a unique architecture: only one planet, an Earth-sized body orbiting extremely close to its parent star. The researchers estimate that systems like this account for about the same fraction of exostellar systems as the hot Jupiters do.
Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – Distinctive exoplanet population found in Kepler data