Rocky Worlds Discussions

Cayman T. Unterborn (Southwest Research Institute) Classifying small exoplanets as rocky, volatile-rich, or iron-enriched is a prerequisite for efficient allocation of atmospheric characterization resources. The Nominally Rocky Planet Zone (NRPZ)...

Eleonora Alei (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) One of the primary goals of the astronomical community in the next few decades is to characterize temperate terrestrial exoplanets to search for life. To address this challenge, the US Astro2020 De...

Shang-Min (Shami) Tsai (ASIAA) Sub-Neptune exoplanets are the most common class of planets detected to date. They occupy the transitional regime between rocky planets and gas giants, yet degeneracies in their internal structure leave their composi...

Ana-Catalina Plesa (DLR) Understanding the interior of rocky planets such as Mercury, the Moon, Mars, and Venus helps us to put the Earth in a global planetary context. The surfaces of terrestrial planets that we observe today record billions of y...

Miki Nakajima (University of Rochester) Planets experience numerous large impacts at the end of the planetary accretion stage. Such large impacts can produce deep magma oceans (MOs) within planets. During magma ocean crystallization, part of the m...

Lisa Dang (Université de Montréal) Lava planets are ultra-short-period planets with bulk densities consistent with terrestrial composition, but dayside temperatures hot enough to melt—and vaporize—rock. Of these planets, the most favorable candida...

Moa Persson (Swedish Institute of Space Physics) Venus has no magnetic shield, yet its atmosphere remains astonishingly thick. How does a planet withstand the solar wind without a protective magnetosphere? The answer lies in the complex interactio...

Day 1 of the fourth edition of the biennial Rocky Worlds conference The planets that are best understood are the four terrestrial planets of our own solar system. Applying the detailed understanding gleaned from these bodies is crucial in our int...

Annelies Mortier (University of Birmingham) In just 30 years, we went from no known exoplanets to more than 6000 known exoplanets. This growing sample of exoplanetary systems allows us to study their mass-radius relationship or lack thereof and th...

Diogo Lourenco (ETH Zurich) Venus’ mass and radius are similar to those of Earth, yet its internal structure, chemical composition, and overral evolution and dynamics remain poorly constrained. A striking difference is Venus’ exceptionally long la...

Remo Burn (MPIA) Owing to observational advances, exoplanets are no longer treated as simple point masses in planet formation theory - their masses, radii, and thus densities are now measurable. Combined with atmospheric composition data, the cha...

Kazumasa Ohno (NAOJ) GJ 1214b is the archetype low-density sub-Neptune orbiting around a M-dwarf. The bulk composition of GJ 1214b remained elusive, as its mass-radius relation can be explained either by a rocky core with a hydrogen-rich envelope...

Michael L. Wong & Anirudh Prabhu (Carnegie Earth & Planets Laboratory) Humanity is embarking on a potential golden age of astrobiology, with numerous current and future space missions being tasked with the explicit goal of searching for evidenc...

Sebastiaan Krijt (University of Exeter) The properties of planetary systems depend sensitively on the physical and chemical structure of the protoplanetary discs in which they form. At the same time, the processes associated with planet formation...

Katherine de Kleer (Caltech) Tides are a key internal energy source for numerous Solar System moons as well as exoplanets, driving their chemical evolution, geological activity, and even habitability. At Jupiter’s moon Io, tides power dramatic vo...

Michael Way (NASA/GISS, Uppsala University) In recent years a great deal of work has appeared related to better quantifying Venus' evolutionary path from Magma Ocean to present day Hell House world. We will present the latest results on these evo...

Joshua Krissansen-Totton (University of Washington) Early JWST observations of hot rocky exoplanets have revealed that many of these objects may be airless rocks. For example, JWST observations of TRAPPIST-1b [1] and c [2] disfavor substantial ...

Jayne Birkby (University of Oxford) High resolution cross-correlation spectroscopy (HRCCS) has proven a powerful and highly versatile tool in the characterization of exoplanet atmospheres. Its sensitivity to the position and shape of exoplanet sp...

Renyu Hu (JPL Caltech) JWST enables the measurements of the thermal emission spectra of small exoplanets to characterize their atmospheres and surfaces. Such measurements open up a new way to test models of atmospheric evolution and retention. I ...

Anna Mittelholz (ETH Zurich) Planetary missions to Mars have enabled us to study its magnetic field environment - an important component of Mars’ history that is intertwined with virtually any other aspect of planetary evolution. Substantial prog...