Recent content by ExoExplorer

Planets b, c, and possibly d are all in runaway greenhouse state, so their low densities are likely the result of massive and thick steam atmospheres not a layer of ocean or ice. Little water building up bars of water vapor envelope can already explain the radius and masses of the inner three...

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics and Astrophysics in arxiv are good sources, but some of these articles are still under peer review and waiting to be accepted. I would recommend MNRAS, A&A, ApJ, AJ, Icarus, Nature Astronomy, Nature Geoscience, PASP, ARAA, A&AR, Space Science Review, JGR, EPSL...

Both Kepler-90 and Kepler-80 are too faint for radial velocity work. The TTV-derived masses for Kepler-80d, e b and c are based on the work of MacDonald et al (2016). One caveat about TTV-derived mass is that it might be perturbed by an undiscovered planet in the system. Thus, when MacDonald et...

True, but I think the goal of fully characterizing planets would shift to image the nearby terrestrial planets in the next few decades. The Kepler habitable-zone planets are so far away that imaging their separation angles is impossible to achieve in the next 30 years. Perhaps transmission...

Take Kepler's field of view as an example, Cygnus was intentionally chosen to be the target of Kepler mission because of high density of stars. The goal of Kepler mission was to understand the occurrence rate of Earth-like planets (define as similar insolation and size). While many Earth-like...

Very interesting question. This planet population trend can also be found in NASA Exoplanet Archive, and it is not observational biases! It is actually an unresolved phenomenon that is not predicted by current theories of planet formation. This gap has many names, such as sub-Jovian desert...

Unfortunately, new discovery of Earth-like planets around G-dwarfs by transit photometry would probably not be made until the end of 2020s. TESS is designed to survey all-sky within 2 years. In order to complete this task, it will only monitor each sky patch for less than a month (27.4 days...