English

Identifying interesting planetary systems for future X-ray observations

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2022-05-25 v1 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

X-ray observations of star-planet systems are important to grow our understanding of exoplanets; these observation allow for studies of photoevaporation of the exoplanetary atmosphere, and in some cases even estimations of the size of the outer planetary atmosphere. The German-Russian eROSITA instrument onboard the SRG (Spectrum Roentgen Gamma) mission is performing the first all-sky X-ray survey since the 1990s, and provides X-ray fluxes and spectra of exoplanet host stars over a much larger volume than was accessible before. Using new eROSITA data as well as archival data from XMM-Newton, Chandra and ROSAT we estimate mass loss rates of exoplanets under an energy-limited escape scenario, and identify several exoplanets with strong X-ray irradiation and expected mass-loss that are amenable to follow-up observations at other wavelengths. We model sample spectra using a toy model of an exoplanetary atmosphere to predict what exoplanet transit observations with future X-ray missions such as Athena will look like, and estimate the observable X-ray transmission spectrum for a typical Hot Jupiter-type exoplanet.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2201.04508,
  title  = {Identifying interesting planetary systems for future X-ray observations},
  author = {Grace Foster and Katja Poppenhaeger},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.04508},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

6 pages, 6 figures, XMM-Newton 2021 Science Workshop proceedings

R2 v1 2026-06-24T08:47:47.949Z