“If you can’t keep an atmosphere, you can't be habitable.”
Studying how these worlds evolve and lose their atmospheres can help scientists understand how other exoplanets lose their atmospheres. And that, says astronomer Heather Knutson of Caltech, can provide intel on what types of planets might have habitable environments. “Because if you can’t keep an atmosphere,” she says, “you can’t be habitable.”
So the team looked at three more mini-Neptunes orbiting other stars and compared those worlds to the first planet they had observed. Each of these planets occasionally “When a planet is losing its atmosphere, you get this big, sort of cometlike tail of gas coming out from the planet,” Knutson says. If the gas instead is still bound to the planet — as is the case for Neptune in our solar system — the astronomers would have seen a circle. “We don’t fully understand all the shapes that we see in the outflows,” she says, “but we see they’re not spherical.”
These rates, though, are just snapshots in time, says Ian Crossfield, an exoplanet researcher at the University of Kansas in Lawrence who was not involved with this work. For each planet, “you don’t know exactly how it’s been losing atmosphere throughout its entire history and into the future,” he says. “All we know is what we see today.” Even with such open questions, he adds, the idea that mini-Neptunes turn into super-Earths “seems plausible.
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