Search for low-mass exoplanets by gravitational microlensing at high magnification

Observations of the gravitational microlensing event MOA 2003-BLG-32/OGLE 2003-BLG-219 are presented, for which the peak magnification was over 500, the highest yet reported. Continuous observations around the peak enabled a sensitive search for planets orbiting the lens star. No planets were detected. Planets 1.3 times heavier than Earth were excluded from more than 50% of the projected annular region from approximately 2.3 to 3.6 astronomical units surrounding the lens star, Uranus-mass planets were excluded from 0.9 to 8.7 astronomical units, and planets 1.3 times heavier than Saturn were excluded from 0.2 to 60 astronomical units. These are the largest regions of sensitivity yet achieved in searches for extrasolar planets orbiting any star.     

Evidence against hydrogen-based microbial ecosystems in basalt aquifers

It has been proposed that hydrogen produced from basalt-ground-water interactions may serve as an energy source that supports the existence of microorganisms in the deep subsurface on Earth and possibly on other planets. However, experiments demonstrated that hydrogen is not produced from basalt at an environmentally relevant, alkaline pH. Small amounts of hydrogen were produced at a lower pH in laboratory incubations, but even this hydrogen production was transitory. Furthermore, geochemical considerations suggest that previously reported rates of hydrogen production cannot be sustained over geologically significant time frames. These findings indicate that hydrogen production from basalt-ground-water interactions may not support microbial metabolism in the subsurface.     

Exotic Earths: forming habitable worlds with giant planet migration

Close-in giant planets (e.g., "hot Jupiters") are thought to form far from their host stars and migrate inward, through the terrestrial planet zone, via torques with a massive gaseous disk. Here we simulate terrestrial planet growth during and after giant planet migration. Several-Earth-mass planets also form interior to the migrating jovian planet, analogous to recently discovered "hot Earths." Very-water-rich, Earth-mass planets form from surviving material outside the giant planet's orbit, often in the habitable zone and with low orbital eccentricities. More than a third of the known systems of giant planets may harbor Earth-like planets.     

Runaway growth of planetary embryos facilitated by massive bodies in a protoplanetary disk

About 30% of detected extrasolar planets exist in multiple-star systems. The standard model of planet formation cannot easily accommodate such systems and has difficulty explaining the odd orbital characteristics of most extrasolar giant planets. We demonstrate that the formation of terrestrial-size planets may be insulated from these problems, enabling much of the framework of the standard model to be salvaged for use in complex systems. A type of runaway growth is identified that allows planetary embryos to form by a combination of nebular gas drag and perturbations from massive companions-be they giant planets, brown dwarfs, or other stars.     

Interstellar cloud material: contribution to planetary atmospheres

A statistical analysis of the properties of dense interstellar clouds indicates that the solar system has encountered at least a dozen clouds of sufficient density to cause planets to accumulate nonnegligible amounts of some isotopes. The effect is most pronounced for neon. This mechanism could be responsible for much of the neon in Earth's atmosphere. For Mars, the predicted amount of neon added by cloud encounters greatly exceeds the present abundance.     

The use of transit timing to detect terrestrial-mass extrasolar planets

Future surveys for transiting extrasolar planets are expected to detect hundreds of jovian-mass planets and tens of terrestrial-mass planets. For many of these newly discovered planets, the intervals between successive transits will be measured with an accuracy of 0.1 to 100 minutes. We show that these timing measurements will allow for the detection of additional planets in the system (not necessarily transiting) by their gravitational interaction with the transiting planet. The transit-time variations depend on the mass of the additional planet, and in some cases terrestrial-mass planets will produce a measurable effect. In systems where two planets are seen to transit, the density of both planets can be determined without radial-velocity observations.     

Discovery of a Jupiter/Saturn analog with gravitational microlensing

Searches for extrasolar planets have uncovered an astonishing diversity of planetary systems, yet the frequency of solar system analogs remains unknown. The gravitational microlensing planet search method is potentially sensitive to multiple-planet systems containing analogs of all the solar system planets except Mercury. We report the detection of a multiple-planet system with microlensing. We identify two planets with masses of approximately 0.71 and approximately 0.27 times the mass of Jupiter and orbital separations of approximately 2.3 and approximately 4.6 astronomical units orbiting a primary star of mass approximately 0.50 solar mass at a distance of approximately 1.5 kiloparsecs. This system resembles a scaled version of our solar system in that the mass ratio, separation ratio, and equilibrium temperatures of the planets are similar to those of Jupiter and Saturn. These planets could not have been detected with other techniques; their discovery from only six confirmed microlensing planet detections suggests that solar system analogs may be common.     

Extrasolar planets: constraints for planet formation models

Since 1995, more than 150 extrasolar planets have been discovered, most of them in orbits quite different from those of the giant planets in our own solar system. The number of discovered extrasolar planets demonstrates that planetary systems are common but also that they may possess a large variety of properties. As the number of detections grows, statistical studies of the properties of exoplanets and their host stars can be conducted to unravel some of the key physical and chemical processes leading to the formation of planetary systems.     

The occurrence and mass distribution of close-in super-Earths, Neptunes, and Jupiters

The questions of how planets form and how common Earth-like planets are can be addressed by measuring the distribution of exoplanet masses and orbital periods. We report the occurrence rate of close-in planets (with orbital periods less than 50 days), based on precise Doppler measurements of 166 Sun-like stars. We measured increasing planet occurrence with decreasing planet mass (M). Extrapolation of a power-law mass distribution fitted to our measurements, df/dlogM = 0.39 M(-0.48), predicts that 23% of stars harbor a close-in Earth-mass planet (ranging from 0.5 to 2.0 Earth masses). Theoretical models of planet formation predict a deficit of planets in the domain from 5 to 30 Earth masses and with orbital periods less than 50 days. This region of parameter space is in fact well populated, implying that such models need substantial revision.     

New worlds on the horizon: Earth-sized planets close to other stars

The search for habitable planets like Earth around other stars fulfills an ancient imperative to understand our origins and place in the cosmos. The past decade has seen the discovery of hundreds of planets, but nearly all are gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn. Recent advances in instrumentation and new missions are extending searches to planets the size of Earth but closer to their host stars. There are several possible ways such planets could form, and future observations will soon test those theories. Many of these planets we discover may be quite unlike Earth in their surface temperature and composition, but their study will nonetheless inform us about the process of planet formation and the frequency of Earth-like planets around other stars.     

Kepler-36: a pair of planets with neighboring orbits and dissimilar densities

In the solar system, the planets' compositions vary with orbital distance, with rocky planets in close orbits and lower-density gas giants in wider orbits. The detection of close-in giant planets around other stars was the first clue that this pattern is not universal and that planets' orbits can change substantially after their formation. Here, we report another violation of the orbit-composition pattern: two planets orbiting the same star with orbital distances differing by only 10% and densities differing by a factor of 8. One planet is likely a rocky "super-Earth," whereas the other is more akin to Neptune. These planets are 20 times more closely spaced and have a larger density contrast than any adjacent pair of planets in the solar system.     

PLANETARY SCIENCE: Newfound Worlds Hint at Hard-Knock Life

Last week at the International Astronomical Union 24th General Assembly, astronomers announced nine newly discovered planets orbiting other stars. The roster of extrasolar planets, now nearing 50, suggests that stars are fecund breeding grounds for worlds but that young planets must battle hordes of rivals for a handful of stable orbits.     

Occurrence of Earth-like bodies in planetary systems

Present theories of terrestrial planet formation predict the rapid ;;runaway formation' of planetary embryos. The sizes of the embryos increase with heliocentric distance. These embryos then merge to form planets. In earlier Monte Carlo simulations of the merger of these embryos it was assumed that embryos did not form in the asteroid belt, but this assumption may not be valid. Simulations in which runaways were allowed to form in the asteroid belt show that, although the initial distributions of mass, energy, and angular momentum are different from those observed today, during the growth of the planets these distributions spontaneously evolve toward those observed, simply as a result of known solar system processes. Even when a large planet analogous to ;;Jupiter' does not form, an Earth-sized planet is almost always found near Earth's heliocentric distance. These results suggest that occurrence of Earth-like planets may be a common feature of planetary systems.     

The origin of chaos in the outer solar system

Classical analytic theories of the solar system indicate that it is stable, but numerical integrations suggest that it is chaotic. This disagreement is resolved by a new analytic theory. The theory shows that the chaos among the jovian planets results from the overlap of the components of a mean motion resonance among Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, and provides rough estimates of the Lyapunov time (10(7) years) and the dynamical lifetime of Uranus (10(18) years). The jovian planets must have entered the resonance after all the gas and most of the planetesimals in the protoplanetary disk were removed.     

The Kuiper belt and the solar system's comet disk

Our planetary system is embedded in a small-body disk of asteroids and comets, vestigial remnants of the original planetesimal population that formed the planets. Once formed, those planets dispersed most of the remaining small bodies. Outside of Neptune, this process has left our Kuiper belt and built the Oort cloud, as well as emplacing comets into several other identifiable structures. The orbits in these structures indicate that our outer solar system's comet disk was shaped by a variety of different physical processes, which teach us about how the giant planets formed. Recent work has shown that the scattered disk is the most likely source of short-period comets. Moreover, a growing body of evidence indicates that the sculpting of the Kuiper belt region may have involved large-scale planetary migration, the presence of other rogue planetary objects in the disk, and/or the close passage of other stars in the Sun's birth cluster.     

Anatomy of a flaring proto-planetary disk around a young intermediate-mass star

Although planets are being discovered around stars more massive than the Sun, information about the proto-planetary disks where such planets have built up is sparse. We have imaged mid-infrared emission from polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons at the surface of the disk surrounding the young intermediate-mass star HD 97048 and characterized the disk. The disk is in an early stage of evolution, as indicated by its large content of dust and its hydrostatic flared geometry, indicative of the presence of a large amount of gas that is well mixed with dust and gravitationally stable. The disk is a precursor of debris disks found around more-evolved A stars such as beta-Pictoris and provides the rare opportunity to witness the conditions prevailing before (or during) planet formation.     

Proximity of jupiter-like planets to low-mass stars

The sensitivities of astrometric and radial velocity searches for extrasolar planets are strongly dependent on planetary masses and orbits. Because most nearby stars are less massive than the sun, the first detection is likely to be of a Jupiter-mass planet orbiting a low-mass star, with a possible theoretical expectation being that Jupiter-like planets will be found much closer [inside the Earth-sun separation of 1 astronomical unit (AU)] to these low-luminosity stars than Jupiter is to the sun (5.2 AU). However, radiative hydrodynamic models of protoplanetary disks around low-mass stars (of 0.1 to 1 solar mass) show that Jupiter-like planets should form at distances (approximately 4 to 5 AU) that are only weakly dependent on the stellar mass.     

Asteroid families: observational evidence for common origins

Colors of minor planets in the UBV system indicate compositions quite distinct from those of the field population in each of three Hirayama families. The Eos and Koronis families apparently originated from the collisional fragmentation of undifferentiated silicate bodies, and the Nysa group from a geochemically differentiated parent body.     

Melatonin, a pineal substance: effect on the rat ovary

Daily injection of microgram amounts of melatonin in rats decreased the incidence of estrus and reduced ovarian weight. Circulating melatonin was selectively taken up and retained by the ovary and pineal gland; this effect was reduced by exposure of rats to constant light. A single injection of melatonin lowered the incidence of estrus among rats exposed to constant light.     

Why does the Earth spin forward?

The spins of the terrestrial planets likely arose as the planets formed by the accretion of planetesimals. Depending on the masses of the impactors, the planet's final spin can either be imparted by many small bodies (ordered accretion), in which case the spin is determined by the mean angular momentum of the impactors, or by a few large bodies (stochastic accretion), in which case the spin is a random variable whose distribution is determined by the root-mean-square angular momentum of the impactors. In the case of ordered accretion, the planet's obliquity is expected to be near 0 degrees or 180 degrees , whereas, if accretion is stochastic, there should be a wide range of obliquities. Analytic arguments and extensive orbital integrations are used to calculate the expected distributions of spin rate and obliquity as a function of the planetesimal mass and velocity distributions. The results imply that the spins of the terrestrial planets are determined by stochastic accretion.