Hot Jupiters: The OG Exoplanets

Author: Hayley Beltz.
Editors: Alison Claire Ludzki, Callie Corsa, and Sarah Kearns

Take a moment to remember that you and everyone you know live on a small blue orb hurling itself around a hot ball of hydrogen and helium that pays us no mind. Furthermore, we are only one of eight staggeringly diverse planets within our solar system that have been making this trip for billions of years. These planets range from hot rocks too small to even hold onto an atmosphere to cooler, massive gas giants where a day lasts less than 10 hours. Our solar system is only one of many (billions) and is only a small sample of the set of possible planet types and configurations. When astronomers started to look outside our solar system at nearby stars and the planets that orbit them–known as exoplanets–we began to understand just how strange other worlds can be.  Our solar system was unable to prepare us for what we saw first: Hot Jupiters. Continue reading “Hot Jupiters: The OG Exoplanets”