Young, close-orbiting exoplanets known as sub-Neptunes may form farther from their stars and migrate inward or lose their atmospheres over time, according to new findings using NASA’s TESS data.
Researchers at Penn State developed a tool called Pterodactyls to cut through stellar noise and study planets around young stars, discovering that the frequency of sub-Neptunes changes as stars age. These patterns suggest a mix of planetary migration and atmospheric loss, challenging the notion that our solar system is a universal template. Future missions may uncover even more secrets of how planets form and evolve.
Unraveling Planet Formation Mysteries
A new study led by Penn State researchers shows that a mix of cosmic processes helps shape one of the most common types of planets found outside our solar system. Using data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), the team studied young sub-Neptunes, planets larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune, that orbit very close to their stars. Their findings offer new insights into how these planets may migrate inward over time or lose their atmospheres during the early stages of development.
The study was published on March 17 in the Astronomical Journal. According to the research team, the results provide important clues about the nature and origins of sub-Neptunes, a class of planets that remains mysterious due to its absence in our own solar system.
The Puzzling Abundance of Close-In Planets
“The majority of the 5,500 or so exoplanets discovered to date have a very close orbit to their stars, closer than Mercury to our sun, which we call ‘close-in’ planets,” said Rachel Fernandes, President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State and leader of the research team. “Many of these are gaseous sub-Neptunes, a type of planet absent from our own solar system. While our gas giants, like Jupiter and Saturn, formed farther from the sun, it’s unclear how so many close-in sub-Neptunes managed to survive near their stars, where they are bombarded by intense stellar radiation.”
Studying Planets Around Young Stars
To better understand how sub-Neptunes form and evolve, the researchers turned to planets around young stars, which only recently became observable thanks to TESS.
“Comparing the frequency of exoplanets of certain sizes around stars of different ages can tell us a lot about the processes that shape planet formation,” Fernandes said. “If planets commonly form at specific sizes and locations, we should see a similar frequency of those sizes across different ages. If we don’t, it suggests that certain processes are changing these planets over time.”
Observing planets around young stars, however, has traditionally been difficult. Young stars emit bursts of intense radiation, rotate quickly, and are highly active, creating high levels of “noise” that make it challenging to observe planets around them.
“Young stars in their first billion years of life throw tantrums, emitting a ton of radiation,” Fernandes explained. “These stellar tantrums cause a lot of noise in the data, so we spent the last six years developing a computational tool called Pterodactyls to see through that noise and actually detect young planets in TESS data.”
Detecting Planetary Orbits with TESS
The research team used Pterodactyls to evaluate TESS data and identify planets with orbital periods of 12 days or less — for reference, much less than Mercury’s 88-day orbit —with the goal of examining the planet sizes, as well as how the planets were shaped by the radiation from their host stars. Because the team’s survey window was 27 days, this allowed them to see two full orbits from potential planets. They focused on planets between a radius of 1.8 and 10 times the size of Earth, allowing the team to see if the frequency of sub-Neptunes is similar or different in young systems versus older systems previously observed with TESS and NASA’s retired Kepler Space Telescope.
Planet Frequencies and Their Evolution
The researchers found that the frequency of close-in sub-Neptunes changes over time, with fewer sub-Neptunes around stars between 10 and 100 million years of age compared to those between 100 million and 1 billion years of age. However, the frequency of close-in sub-Neptunes is much less in older, more stable systems.
“We believe a variety of processes are shaping the patterns we see in close-in stars of this size,” Fernandes said. “It’s possible that many sub-Neptunes originally formed further away from their stars and slowly migrated inward over time, so we see more of them at this orbital period in the intermediate age. In later years, it’s possible that planets are more commonly shrinking when radiation from the star essentially blows away its atmosphere, a process called atmospheric mass loss that could explain the lower frequency of sub-Neptunes. But it’s likely a combination of cosmic processes shaping these patterns over time rather than one dominant force.”
In this hypothetical planetary system depicted over time, the planets b through f are depicted from 10 million years (Myr) to more than 1 billion years (Gyr). This progression highlights key processes shaping the system, such as atmospheric mass loss and compositional evolution driven by stellar radiation and planetary interactions. Credit: Abigail Minnich
Future Missions and Deeper Insights
The researchers said they would like to expand their observation window with TESS to observe planets with longer orbital periods. Future missions like the European Space Agency’s PLATO may also allow the research team to observe planets of smaller sizes, similar to that of Mercury, ” data-gt-translate-attributes=”[{“attribute”:”data-cmtooltip”, “format”:”html”}]” tabindex=”0″ role=”link”>Venus, Earth and ” data-gt-translate-attributes=”[{“attribute”:”data-cmtooltip”, “format”:”html”}]” tabindex=”0″ role=”link”>Mars. Expanding their analysis to smaller and more distant planets could help the researchers refine their tool and provide additional information about how and where planets form.
Additionally, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope could permit the characterization of the density and composition of individual planets, which Fernandes said could give additional hints to where they formed.
Toward a Broader Cosmic Perspective
“Combining studies of individual planets with the population studies like we conducted here would give us a much better picture of planet formation around young stars,” Fernandes said. “The more solar systems and planets we discover, the more we realize that our solar system isn’t really the template; it’s an exception. Future missions might enable us to find smaller planets around young stars and give us a better picture of how planetary systems form and evolve with time, helping us better understand how our solar system, as we know it today, came to be.”
Reference: “Signatures of Atmospheric Mass Loss and Planet Migration in the Time Evolution of Short-period Transiting Exoplanets” by Rachel B. Fernandes, Galen J. Bergsten, Gijs D. Mulders, Ilaria Pascucci, Kevin K. Hardegree-Ullman, Steven Giacalone, Jessie L. Christiansen, James G. Rogers, Akash Gupta, Rebekah I. Dawson, Tommi T. Koskinen, Kiersten M. Boley, Jason L. Curtis, Katia Cunha, Eric E. Mamajek, Sabina Sagynbayeva, Sakhee S. Bhure, David R. Ciardi, Preethi R. Karpoor, Kyle A. Pearson, Jon K. Zink and Gregory A. Feiden, 17 March 2025, The Astronomical Journal.
DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/adb97e
In addition to lead author Rachel Fernandes, the research team includes Rebekah Dawson, who was the Shaffer Career Development Professor in Science and professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State during the study and is now a physical scientist at NASA.
The study also involved collaborators from multiple institutions: Galen J. Bergsten, Ilaria Pascucci, Kevin K. Hardegree-Ullman, Tommi T. Koskinen, and Katia Cunha at the University of Arizona; Gijs Mulders at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile; Steven Giacalone, Eric Mamajek, Kyle Pearson, David Ciardi, Preethi Karpoor, Jessie Christiansen, and Jon Zink at the California Institute of Technology; James Rogers at the University of Cambridge, Los Angeles; Akash Gupta at Princeton University; Kiersten Boley at the Carnegie Institution for Science; Jason Curtis at Columbia University; Sabina Sagynbayeva at Stony Brook University; Sakhee Bhure at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia; and Gregory Feiden at the University of North Georgia.
The research was supported by funding from NASA, including the “Alien Earths” grant, as well as Chile’s National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development and the U.S. National Science Foundation. Additional support came from the Penn State Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds and the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center. Computational work was carried out using Penn State’s Roar supercomputer, managed by the University’s Institute for Computational and Data Sciences.
