Rory Barnes, UW
"In with the Tide: The Coming Wave of Super-Earths, Super-Ios and Super-Venuses"

Nov 17, Tue: 12:00-1:00pm

The current census of exoplanets points toward a significant number of close-in terrestrial-like planets. Current detection biases favor the discovery of "super-Earths", rocky planets more massive than Earth. However, for close-in planets (within 0.05 AU of the host star), tidal effects may be extreme. Tides can shrink and circularize orbits, a process which can dissipate large amounts of energy inside the planets. In many cases the heating rate can be larger than on Io, making these worlds "super-Ios". In a more limited number of cases, the heating may be so strong as to boil off all the water, producing a runaway greenhouse atmosphere, making the planets "super-Venuses". The recently-launched Kepler satellite is sensitive to these types of planets, and conservative estimates, based on the known distribution of exoplanet orbital properties, suggest it will discover at least 10 super-Ios and 1 super-Venus. With short orbital periods (~5 days), these planets have already transited >10 times and, hence, Kepler has probably already found them. These planets, along with those discovered by the European CoRoT spacecraft, will provide our first glimpse into the nature of terrestrial exoplanets.

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