About this Event
Thousands of exoplanets have been discovered in the past 25 years. Kepler has shown us close-in, sub-Neptune exoplanets are extremely common in our Galaxy: with every Sun-like star having an order of unity chance of hosting them. The TESS mission is currently conducting an all-sky survey to discover the closest and brightest planet hosts amenable to follow-up studies using the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope. With LUVOIR/HabEx and GMT/TMT recommended by the latest NASA Decadal Survey, the detection of biosignatures on exoplanets may be just a few decades ahead of us. However, there are still major gaps of knowledge in our understanding of planet formation, evolution, and habitability. To understand a process as complex as planet formation, the most extreme cases are often most revealing. The extreme exoplanets are ideal for isolating and magnifying critical aspects of planet formation that are still missing in our current theories, that also gave rise to their observed peculiar properties.
At the hottest extreme of planet formation are the ultra-short-period planets (USP, orbital period ~1 day,
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About this Event
Thousands of exoplanets have been discovered in the past 25 years. Kepler has shown us close-in, sub-Neptune exoplanets are extremely common in our Galaxy: with every Sun-like star having an order of unity chance of hosting them. The TESS mission is currently conducting an all-sky survey to discover the closest and brightest planet hosts amenable to follow-up studies using the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope. With LUVOIR/HabEx and GMT/TMT recommended by the latest NASA Decadal Survey, the detection of biosignatures on exoplanets may be just a few decades ahead of us. However, there are still major gaps of knowledge in our understanding of planet formation, evolution, and habitability. To understand a process as complex as planet formation, the most extreme cases are often most revealing. The extreme exoplanets are ideal for isolating and magnifying critical aspects of planet formation that are still missing in our current theories, that also gave rise to their observed peculiar properties.
At the hottest extreme of planet formation are the ultra-short-period planets (USP, orbital period ~1 day,