Data collected on the more than 4,000 exoplanets found so far has revealed a very interesting pattern – some of them seem to be shrinking in size. In fact, there are very few exoplanets that are between 1.5 and 2 times larger than Earth that are in close proximity of their host stars (this is called the small planet radius gap).
According to a new study, it is quite possible that exoplanets located close to their stars were much larger in size but after billions of years they ended up shrinking. Trevor David, who is an astrophysicist at the Flatiron Institute in New York City, said, “The overarching point is that planets are not the static spheres of rocks and gas we sometimes tend to think of them as.”
UH Mānoa’s 2021 Awards recognizes the leadership and service of its finest faculty, staff and students committed to enhancing the university’s mission of excellence.
(Photo credit: NASA/Ames Research Center/W. Stenzel/D. Rutter)From centuries of studying the planets within our solar system, astronomers have wondered.
NASA/Ames Research Center/W. Stenzel/D. Rutter)
From centuries of studying the planets within our solar system, astronomers have wondered how planets form and evolve to become the ones we observe today. A team of astronomers led by University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Institute for Astronomy (
IfA) graduate student
Travis Berger found that an intriguing class of Neptune-sized planets shrink over billions of years. The study was published in the
One of the most surprising findings of the past decade was the discovery of a new branch in the planetary “family tree,” separating slightly larger than Earth (super-Earths) from those somewhat smaller than Neptune (sub-Neptunes). However, it is unclear how these different-sized planets formed, as observations are only a single snapshot out of a billions of years long lifetime for each individual planetary system.