Exocast-57c: Exoplanet News

In this episode the Exocast team take a look at three new studies presented in the exoplanet literature:

• Andrew introduces us to a new Nature Astronomy paper “Assessing planetary complexity and potential agnostic biosignatures using epsilon machines” – Bartlett et al. 2022. As Hugh points out you may only recognise a few words in that title, but Andrew does a fantastic job breaking down the study so have a listen and let us know what you think.
• Hugh then takes us through a second Nature Astronomy paper this time looking at the famous (but generally unsuccessful ExoCup contestant) TRAPPIST – “An upper limit on late accretion and water delivery in the Trappist-1 exoplanet system” – Raymond et al. 2022. This paper looks at what would happen to the mean motion resonance of the planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system if they experiences a late heavy bombardment by extra mass or planetesimals being thrown into the system.
• Finally, Hannah tries to take on a new topic this week, talking about simulations of space weather and coronal mass ejections and the impact those will have on planetary systems. In this she presents the work from the Astrophysical Journal “Simulating the Space Weather in the AU Mic System: Stellar Winds and Extreme Coronal Mass Ejections” – Alverado-Gomez et al. 2022 which looks at the close-in mini-Neptune’s in the young AU Mic planetary system. It turns out stars are complicated and we need to think about a whole load of things to understand our exoplanets and that some worlds may have been doomed before they started.

What Research did you enjoy this month? Join in the discussion in the comments below, and find us on Twitter. If you want to support the Exocast Podcast then you can Buy us a Coffee, or get your own merchandise at exocast.threadless.com

Exocast is edited by composer/muscian Fergus Hall (https://fergushallcomposer.com)