As always, the exocast team covers a few extraordinary recent exoplanetary papers in Exocast-54 c

And excitingly we have hit 10,000! exoplanet candidates on the archive. That is a lot of potential planets to consider.

• Andrew introduces the term “Hycean” to the exocast team presenting Habitability and Biosignatures of Hycean Worlds — Madhusudan et al. 2021; sparking a juicy discussion with a not so positive outlook for this word-smash of “hydrogen” and “ocean” from Hannah and Hugh. The paper got heavily covered by the press, and stretches the limits on what models can tell us. Seriously have a listen and make up your own mind on this one – it IS a juicy discussion.
• Hannah then breaks the rules and presents seven, that’s right SEVEN, papers all from a series published in Elements Magazine, V17, No4 and all available on the arxiv – the series is titled “Geoscience Beyond the Solar System” and covers a series of reviews on the topic of rocky exoplanets and the role of geology that kind of set the first paper in its place.
  • Article 1: Why Geoscience and Exoplanetary Science Need Each Other
  • Article 2: Compositional diversity of rocky exoplanets
  • Article 3: Exogeology from polluted white dwarfs
  • Article 4: The diversity of exoplanets: from interior dynamics to surface expressions
  • Article 5: Leveraging models to constrain the climates of rocky exoplanets
  • Article 6: The air over there: exploring exoplanet atmospheres
  • Article 7: Starting life and searching for life on rocky exoplanets
• Hugh then takes us through the discovery of a “Warm terrestrial planet with half the mass of Venus transiting a nearby star” — Demangeon et al. 2021. The star in question is L 98-59 and it was known to host 3 – 5 planets. This new paper presents the spectra taken with ESPRESSO over two years to capture the RV from the planets and refined the mass of the planet and their orbital periods better than ever before.

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