Planetary climatology under extreme conditions thanks to GIANO-B, HARPS-N and ESPRESSO observations of the hot Jupiter WASP-76b Among the 6007 confirmed exoplanets to date (09/22/2025), there exists a class of planets absent in the Solar System but crucial for studying atmospheric physics under extreme conditions: ultra-hot Jupiters. These are gas giants in very close orbits around their host stars,
Hot Jupiters are gas giants that orbit at distances less than 0.1 AU from their host star. But what determines the final orbital radius of these planets? In intermediate-mass stars, it seems to be the dispersion of gas in their protoplanetary disks. Hot Jupiters are a class of exoplanets that are not found in our Solar System. They are
Observations carried out with the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo of two exoplanets belonging to the hot Jupiter class reveal an atmosphere rich in water, despite the high temperatures. Water is an essential ingredient for life as we know it—not only because we drink it, but because it is an exceptional solvent for the chemical processes that underlie life on Earth.
The discovery of the first planet orbiting around another star occurred in the 1995, thanks to the astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz. This discovery set a milestone in astronomy both because it was the first observational confirmation of the existence of planets orbiting around other stars (in this case 51 Pegasi), and because of the nature of this exoplanet. It
Ultra-hot Jupiters are gaseous planets orbiting at close distances from their central stars, with rotation periods shorter than 3 days. Their atmospheres are thus heated, more than 2000 degrees, by the incident radiation emitted by the central star. For this reason, the atmospheres of ultra-hot Jupiters shows peculiar properties compared with planets of other types. For instance, they are affected
Some of the exoplanets known so far belong to classes that do not exist in our Solar System. For instance, the class of the Hot Jupiters, i.e., gaseous giant planets orbiting at close distances from their stars (typically less than 0.5 AU, Astronomical Unit, where a 1 AU is the average distance between Sun and Earth, about 150 million km).
The discovery of the first exoplanet in 1995 was a challenge to our knowledge of the architecture of planetary systems. The planet orbiting around the star 51 Peg, in fact, was different than the planets in our Solar System: it was a gaseous giant orbiting at only 0.05 Astronomical Units (A.U., where 1 A.U. is the average distance between Earth
The stellar magnetic activity can produce an important emission of energetic X-ray and UV radiation. This emission is typically variable, both because the magnetic activity changes over short time scales, and because it decreases during stellar evolution. For instance, solar-type stars in the pre-main sequence phase (i.e. younger than 30 million years) are thousand times brighter in X-rays than main
Most of the exoplanets identified so far have been discovered by using two techniques: transits and radial velocity. In particular, radial velocity method consists in detecting the oscillations of stars around the center of mass common with their planetary systems by measuring periodic doppler shifts in high-resolution spectra. The main difficulty with this technique is the fact that stellar activity,
di Mario Giuseppe Guarcello ( segui mguarce) A guardare il nostro Sistema Solare, sembrerebbe che il destino di un pianeta sia quello di girare attorno la sua stella in un’orbita stabile ed imperturbata. Ma se c’è una cosa che la ricerca sui pianeti extrasolari ci ha insegnato, è che non è affatto così. Soprattutto nelle sue prime
