And a Glossary of Their Quarry
Friday, November 29th, 2013Glossary of Their Quarry. #exoplanet types: circumbinary, pulsar, core & rogue. Hot Jupiters, waterworlds, #exomoons
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6132/570.summary
And a Glossary of Their Quarry.
Quoting from the podcast summary…
QT:{{”
So far, scientists have uncovered over 800 exoplanets roaming the cosmos—but as Sara Seager said earlier, we’re still searching for that Earth-like, Goldilocks planet.
…
Most of the planets we’ve discovered up until this point are what’s called Hot
Jupiters, which are gas giants about the size of Jupiter in our solar system with a pretty
big range on either side, so the smallest Hot Jupiters would be about 50 Earth masses.
…
The nastiest place to live would probably be pulsar planets.
…
And I
think another really unpleasant place to be would be a core planet. So core planets, they
sort of resemble something like Mercury, the size of Mercury, maybe even smaller.
…
I think just like in the solar system, actually, some of the best places for potentially
finding life outside of our solar system might be moons. So we call them exomoons or
moons orbiting exoplanets.
…
But we have seen and are seeing more and more of are theses
circumbinary planets,
which means a planet with two suns. So, Tatooine is sort of the iconic example.
…
Yes, waterworlds. So those are pretty diverse, and they are usually super-Earth-size so
they’ll be like 10 times the mass of Earth.
…
And then there are some planets that just go rogue.
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