exoplanets | Highly Allochthonous

Tag Archives: exoplanets

Weird rocky exoplanets

Posted on November 23, 2021 by Chris Rowan

Obtaining the composition of rocky exoplanets from the spectral signature produced when their dying parent star eats them is already pretty mind-blowing. But the results – which suggest that on some of these worlds, quartz is substituted for olivine in their … Continue reading →

Categories: geology, planets, rocks & minerals

Older than the solar system

Posted on January 22, 2020 by Chris Rowan

As Carl Sagan once said, “we are made of star stuff“: and here some of it is; mineral grains formed around distant suns, hundreds of millions of years before our solar system was born. These grains of silicon carbide were … Continue reading →

Categories: deep time, geology, planets

Can we detect plate tectonics on exoplanets?

Posted on January 2, 2020 by Chris Rowan

As celebrated in this Ars Technica piece, the 2010s was ‘the decade of the exoplanet’. Largely thanks to the Kepler telescope, the past ten years has seen an explosion in exoplanet discoveries. More than 4000 planets have now been identified orbiting other stars, … Continue reading →

Categories: geology, planets, tectonics, volcanoes