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Gas Dwarf Planets at Stars with 50% more metal rich gas
Planets around other stars tend to come in two basic types: rocky worlds and gas giants. Now, scientists have identified a third class of exoplanets, called “gas dwarfs,” that fall in between the others.
These gas-dwarf alien planets have thick atmospheres like their larger gas-giant cousins but never quite made it to the size of the planetary behemoths found in the Earth's the outer solar system.
The team studied more than 600 planets discovered by NASA's Kepler space telescope and compared their sizes to the amount of elements other than hydrogen and helium contained in their star — a characteristic known as metallicity.
“We were particularly interested in probing the planetary regime smaller than four times the size of Earth, because it includes three-fourths of the planets found by Kepler,” lead author Lars A. Buchhave, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), said in a statement. He presented the findings today (June 2) here at the 224th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Boston.
Source: http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/06/gas-dwarf-planets-at-stars-with-50-more.html
