It was May 2013, and the Kepler space telescope was dead.
The Kepler planet-hunting mission had been discovering new planets since its launch in 2009, but in May 2013 the second of its four reaction wheels failed. The telescope could no longer control where it pointed; the prime Kepler mission was over.
At the time, I was a third-year undergraduate student at the California Institute of Technology, and it seemed to me that the death of the Kepler mission also signified the death of the goals I had spent the last three years developing. I wanted to study new exoplanet systems and determine what they can tell us about how their planets formed. It seemed to be a great time to be starting in the field—the Kepler space telescope had ushered in a new era of exoplanet discovery, and new planets kept pouring in. The possibilities and opportunities felt endless. Eventually, I was sure, all these discoveries would lead to a unified theory of planet formation, and I wanted to help solve that puzzle using the pieces Kepler was finding.
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But without Kepler, the stream of discoveries that had seemed endless only months before seemed to evaporate. I was devastated.
I wouldn’t know for several more years that I was completely wrong about what the death of Kepler meant. The broken telescope was not an end but a new beginning, and it would lead to a transformation in our understanding of a fascinating and mysterious category of planets called hot Jupiters.
The story of hot Jupiters began decades ago. Even before astronomers had developed the technology to be able to look for planets around other stars, scientists imagined what those planets might be like. In 1952 Ukraine-born American astronomer Otto Struve…
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