{"id":3926489,"date":"2026-06-14T15:05:20","date_gmt":"2026-06-14T20:05:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/nasas-proposed-early-evolution-explorer-mission-aims-to-solve-the-radius-valley-mystery\/"},"modified":"2026-06-14T15:05:20","modified_gmt":"2026-06-14T20:05:20","slug":"nasas-proposed-early-evolution-explorer-mission-aims-to-solve-the-radius-valley-mystery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/nasas-proposed-early-evolution-explorer-mission-aims-to-solve-the-radius-valley-mystery\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA&#8217;s proposed Early eVolution Explorer mission aims to solve the radius valley mystery"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>A debate has been raging among planetary scientists for more than a decade\u2014why are there so few exoplanets with a radius of about 1.8 times that of Earth? Exoplanets are currently largely grouped into two distinct categories\u2014&#8221;super-Earths&#8221; are below that size and have rocky interiors, whereas &#8220;sub-Neptunes&#8221; are above that size limit and appear puffier. But researchers don&#8217;t really understand why the path of planetary evolution forces this bifurcation. A new mission proposal, called the Early eVolution Explorer (EVE), wants to find out, and a draft of its concept can be found in preprint form on arXiv.<\/div>\n<p><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2026-06-nasa-early-evolution-explorer-mission.html\" target=\"_blank\">Go to Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A debate has been raging among planetary scientists for more than a decade\u2014why are there so few exoplanets with a radius of about 1.8 times that of Earth? Exoplanets are currently largely grouped into two distinct categories\u2014&#8221;super-Earths&#8221; are below that size and have rocky interiors, whereas &#8220;sub-Neptunes&#8221; are above that size limit and appear puffier. [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3926489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3926489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3926489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3926489\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3926489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3926489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikedyess.info\/para\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3926489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}