WASP-12b: Not a Carbon Planet After All?

Astronomers don’t stop after discovering planets in systems near and far from our own solar system. The next big step is to characterize the planets. We want to understand what they’re made of, what their atmospheres look like, whether they have clouds, how massive they are, how old they are, etc. As it turns out characterizing exoplanets is really, really challenging for both observers and modelers. The challenges encountered are well illustrated by the saga of WASP-12b. Categories: Daily paper summariesTags: atmospheres, carbon, characterization, exoplanets, models, observations(Click to read more...)

Title: Re-evaluating WASP-12b: Strong emission at 2.315 μm, deeper occultations, and an isothermal atmosphere
Authors: Ian Crossfield, Travis Barman, Brad Hansen, Ichi Tanaka, Tadayuki Kodama
First Author’s Institution: Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Heidelberg.
This week there’s been a flurry of excitement in the news about new exoplanet discoveries. First, a group of citizen scientists helped to discover a planet in a 4-star system (see here for a summary, here for the paper). Then the Swiss HARPS team that they found evidence for an Earth-mass planet orbiting our nearest star, Alpha Cen B! I was going to write about this new planet—now the closest exoplanet to us—but others have already ...