Photoevaporation in young planets. The study: “New Constraints on the Future Evaporation of the Young Exoplanets in the V1298 Tau System” of A. Maggio (INAF – OAPA) recently appeared on ApJ

The search for young exoplanets is crucial to our understanding of the planetary formation process and the early evolution of planets. The disc of gas and dust from which planets form, in fact, typically disperse in a few million of years. Before that, the young planets interact with all the material orbiting around the star within the disk, triggering important

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Atmosphere and habitability in terrestrial planets. The study: “A systematic study of CO2 planetary atmospheres and their link to the stellar environment” of A. Petralia (INAF-OAPA) recently appeared on MNRAS

Terrestrial planets are common in the Milky Way. It has been estimated, in fact, that at least 30% of stars in the Solar neighborhood host a terrestrial planet, and this fraction increases to 40% considering the habitable zone around all M stars (e.g. stars with effective temperature between 2400 and 3700 degrees) of the Galaxy. The habitable zone is defined

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An iron-rich atmosphere for the planet KELT-9b. The study: “The GAPS Programme with HARPS-N at TNG. XIX. Atmospheric Rossiter-McLaughlin effect and improved parameters of KELT-9b” of F. Borsa (INAF-OA di Brera) recently appeared on A&A

To date (October 2019), 4073 exoplanets have been confirmed, while 4495 are still candidates. The vast majority of these exoplanets have been discovered with two techniques: the analysis of transits (e.g.: measuring the decline of stellar luminosity during the passage of the planets in across the stellar disk) and radial velocity (by detecting,  thanks to the Doppler effect and spectroscopic

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Artificial Intelligence applied to astrophysics. The paper “ExoGAN: Retrieving Exoplanetary Atmospheres Using Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks” of T. Zingales (UCL, INAF – OAPA) published on AJ

In the last few years, many space missions and ground-based surveys, discovered more than 4000 exoplanets, especially using the transit and radial velocity methods. These two methods combined, give us a first estimation of the bulk density of the planets. In order to have a deeper understanding on the planetary characteristics and history, we also need to study their atmospheres.

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