Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Jan 2011
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011aas...21713501m&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #217, #135.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 43, 2011
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
The past year saw paradigms challenged and long-sought domains detected from Doppler, transit, microlensing, and direct imaging observations of exoplanets. The tilt of orbital planes with respect to stellar equators has been studied in over 30 planetary systems. Shockingly, they are not generally aligned, including some orbits quite tilted relative to the star's equator and a few even retrograde. These misalignments utterly contradict the accepted theory of planet migration in a gaseous protoplanetary disk, and they differ from the co-planar orbits in our own solar system. Equally puzzling, many close-in gas giants display grossly inflated radii, temperature inversions of mysterious origin, and non-equilibrium abundances of CO and methane. Meanwhile, Doppler-detected exoplanets reveal, for the first time, a rapidly rising mass function toward lower masses - all the way to 3 Earth-masses, pointing to the occurrence frequency of Earth-mass planets. The NASA Kepler Mission has discovered over 700 candidate planets, with most having diameters less than 5 times that of Earth and some as small as that of Earth. One planet has a radius, mass, and density in a new domain having no counterpart in our Solar System, opening a new chapter in planetary science. The mutual inclinations and gravitational interactions among planets measured by Kepler provide key information on the formation and evolution of planetary systems. The diversity of exoplanets continues to confound, delight, and inform us about planetary systems in general, with our Solar System being just one example.
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