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Metallicity is a fundamental parameter that contributes to the physical characteristics of a star. However, the low temperatures and complex molecules present in M dwarf atmospheres make it difficult to measure their metallicities using…
Many isolated, old white dwarfs (WDs) show surprising evidence of metals in their photospheres. Given that the timescale for gravitational sedimentation is astronomically short, this is taken as evidence for ongoing accretion, likely of…
Hi-resolution spectroscopy (R > 25,000) has recently emerged as one of the leading methods to detect atomic and molecular species in the atmospheres of exoplanets. However, it has so far been lacking in a robust method to extract…
Context: The thermal and chemical structures of the upper atmospheres of planets crucially influence losses to space and must be understood to constrain the effects of losses on atmospheric evolution. Aims: We develop a 1D first-principles…
[ABRIDGED]We study the carbon abundances with a twofold objective. On the one hand, we want to evaluate the behaviour of carbon in the context of Galactic chemical evolution. On the other hand, we focus on the possible dependence of carbon…
Clouds in the atmospheres of exoplanets confound characterization efforts by reducing, eliminating, and distorting spectral signatures of molecular abundances. As such, interpretations of exoplanet spectra strongly depend on the choice of…
Context: Diffusion of species on the dust surface is a key process for determining the chemical composition of interstellar ices. On the dust surface, adsorbed species diffuse from one potential well to another and react with other adsorbed…
To first order, the Earth as well as other rocky planets in the Solar System and rocky exoplanets orbiting other stars, are refractory pieces of the stellar nebula out of which they formed. To estimate the chemical composition of rocky…
We show that under certain circumstances the differences between the absorption mean and Planck mean opacities can lead to multiple solutions for an LTE atmospheric structure. Since the absorption and Planck mean opacities are not expected…
The mean abundances of Mg, Si, Ca, Ti, Cr and Fe based on both strong and weak lines of Alpha Centauri A are determined by matching the observed line profiles with those synthesized from stellar atmospheric models and comparing these…
Using forward models for representative exoplanet atmospheres and a radiometric instrument model, we have generated synthetic observational data to explore how well the major C- and O-bearing chemical species (CO, CO2, CH4, and H2O),…
Atmospheric characterization through spectroscopic analysis, an essential tool of modern exoplanet science, can benefit significantly from the context provided by interior structure models. In particular, the planet's bulk metallicity $Z_p$…
Abundances of M dwarfs, being the most numerous stellar type in the Galaxy, can enhance our understanding of planet formation processes. They can also be used to study the chemical evolution of the Galaxy, where in particular alpha-capture…
Mineral clouds in substellar atmospheres play a special role as a catalyst for a variety of charge processes. If clouds are charged, the surrounding environment becomes electrically activated, and ensembles of charged grains are…
It has been claimed that the variability of field quasars resembles gravitational lensing by a large cosmological population of free-floating planets with mass of about 10 Earths. But Galactic photometric monitoring experiments, on the…
Binary star systems are assumed to be co-natal and coeval, thus to have identical chemical composition. In this work we aim to test the hypothesis that there is a connection between observed element abundance patterns and the formation of…
Over the last decade, precise exoplanet transmission spectroscopy has revealed the atmospheres of dozens of exoplanets, driven largely by observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope. One major discovery has been the ubiquity of…
Characterizing the atmospheres of extrasolar planets is the new frontier in exoplanetary science. The last two decades of exoplanet discoveries have revealed that exoplanets are very common and extremely diverse in their orbital and bulk…
Molecular abundances in protoplanetary disks are highly sensitive to the local physical conditions, including gas temperature, gas density, radiation field, and dust properties. Often multiple factors are intertwined, impacting the…
Ablation of interplanetary dust supplies oxygen to the upper atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Using recent dynamical model predictions for the dust influx rates to the giant planets (Poppe, A.R.~et al.~[2016], Icarus…