Structure and Composition of Super-Earths
25/03/2009
Campus Boucicaut
15:00
Séminaires Minéralogie
Salle 7.1.17.
Diana Valencia
Poincare Postdoctoral Fellow - Observatoire de la Cote d'Azur
Resumé : Over 300 exoplanets have been found in the last 15 years. With improvement in the precision levels, the lower mass limit is being pushed to values a few times the Earth's mass. This translates to about a dozen discovered super-Earths, including the exciting first transiting super-Earth: CoRoT-7. These planets are mostly solid in composition, they can be either terrestrial or icy/ocean planets. They are very interesting objects because they do not exist in our solar system and because a subset of them might resemble the Earth. To characterize them, we need an understanding of their structure and composition, in light of the data available in the near future: masses and radii. I will present results on their internal structure and discuss the type of information we can derive from these measurements. In addition, I will present possible scenarios for CoRoT-7.