Yale University | 2016 Apr 11
[img3="Artist's conception of a planet's atmosphere being stripped. (Credit: Peter Devine)"]http://news.yale.edu/sites/default/file ... earths.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]An international team of astronomers has found a new category of planets beyond our solar system whose atmosphere has been stripped bare by the radiation from their own sun. ...
“It is as though they are standing very close to a blow-dryer set at maximum speed and heat,” said Yale astronomy professor Sarbani Basu, a co-author of the study. “All that is loose gets blown away. In this case it is the planet’s atmosphere.”
The study uses data from NASA’s Kepler mission to look at super-Earths, which are planets outside our solar system with a mass roughly 2-10 times the mass of Earth. In particular, the researchers focused on super-Earths that receive more than 650 times the radiation from their host star that Earth receives from the Sun.
“This violent stripping occurs in planets that are made up of a rocky core with a gaseous outer layer,” Basu said. “Due to the planets’ proximity to the star, the heat that they suffer means that their envelopes have been blown away by the intense radiation.” ...
Hot super-Earths stripped by their host stars - M. S. Lundkvist et al
- Nature Communications 7:11201 (11 Apr 2016) DOI: 10.1038/ncomms11201