The discovery of multiple exoplanets that appear to be shrinking appears to resolve a 'missing link' in planetary evolution.
Four mini-Neptunes in close proximity to their stars have been found leaking their atmospheres at a rate consistent with eventual total loss. This suggests that these worlds will eventually shrink into terrestrial, roughly Earth-sized planets – and moreover, it's the fault of their stars that they will do so.Although scientists have long thought that these two types of exoplanets were linked, the pathway by which the mini-Neptunes lost their atmospheres was unknown.
The Milky Way galaxy is a big, diverse place, and there are many kinds of exoplanets that have been identified to date that are very different from what we find in our own Solar System. One of those is the– the most common kind of world detected by the Kepler mission, but notably absent from our own little corner of the galaxy.
Super-Earths are the next category down, exoplanets that are between 1 and 1.5 times the radius of Earth. Between around 1.5 and 2 Earth radii, there's a curious gap in which exoplanets are extremely scarce. This is known as theScientists believe that this gap exists because, above a certain critical limit, exoplanets have enough mass to retain a substantial primordial atmosphere that inflates their size, putting them in the class of mini-Neptunes.
One potential pathway, called core-powered mass loss, is the internal heat resulting from planetary formation, in which gravitational binding energy is converted into heat that ejects the primordial atmosphere. The other is called photoevaporation, in which intense X-ray and ultraviolet irradiation from the young star strips away the exoplanet's atmosphere.
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