Special thanks to my co-authors, Prof. Greg Laughlin and Prof. Sarah Millholland! This paper was a lot of fun to work on and I am excited to share it with the world!

The current number of planets is not high enough to determine any bimodality, but we find it will only take ~800 more planets with the necessary parameters to tease out any such bimodality if it exists.

This paper gives a method for *dynamically* probing the split peas in a pod hypothesis. We find a broad distribution of Q values centered on ~10^6. We expect Earth/Neptune planets to be 10^3-10^4.

My paper uses changes in orbits as a proxy for bounces. If a planet rapidly changes its orbit, it dissipates energy quickly and is thus more rock-like. We can use these deviations to calculate tidal Q values for exoplanets and look for how many are super-Earths and how many are sub-Neptunes!

Currently, we can only measure data that allows us to infer the radius, orbit, and sometimes mass of an exoplanet— not a lot of information to work with and certainly not enough to understand the geophysical properties of a planet, like its composition.

If you drop a rock and a bouncy ball from the same height, the rock wouldn’t really bounce, but the bouncy ball would. Replace rock with rocky earth-like planets and bouncy ball with gaseous sub-Neptunes; you have the foundational concept driving the paper.

The paper probes the “tidal Q” of exoplanets, which measures how quickly they dissipate energy, aka their bounciness.