Highly Volcanic Exoplanets, Lava Worlds, and Magma Ocean Worlds: An Emerging Class of Dynamic Exoplanets of Significant Scientific Priority

Understand

Highly volcanic exoplanets, which can be variously characterized as 'lava worlds', 'magma ocean worlds', or 'super-Ios' are high priority targets for investigation.

• The term 'lava world' may refer to any planet with extensive surface lava lakes, while the term 'magma ocean world' refers to planets with global or hemispherical magma oceans at their surface.
• 'Highly volcanic planets', including super-Ios, may simply have large, or large numbers of, active explosive or extrusive volcanoes of any form.
• They are plausibly highly diverse, with magmatic processes across a wide range of compositions, temperatures, activity rates, volcanic eruption styles, and background gravitational force magnitudes.