Related papers: Atmospheric Circulation of Exoplanets
Young terrestrial planets, when they are still embedded in a circumstellar disk, accumulate an atmosphere of nebula gas. The evolution and eventual evaporation of the protoplanetary disk affect the structure and dynamics of the planetary…
At the dawn of the first discovery of exoplanets orbiting sun-like stars in the mid-1990s, few believed that observations of exoplanet atmospheres would ever be possible. After the 2002 Hubble Space Telescope detection of a transiting…
Astronomical surveys have identified numerous exoplanets with bulk compositions that are unlike the planets of the Solar System, including rocky super-Earths and gas-enveloped sub-Neptunes. Observing the atmospheres of these objects…
The discovery of thousands of highly irradiated, low-mass, exoplanets has led to the idea that atmospheric escape is an important process that can drive their evolution. Of particular interest is the inference from recent exoplanet…
An important evolutionary pathway for planetary atmospheres is escape to space, which has been studied on Earth and Mars for several decades and more recently in exoplanets. A particularly important regime is the hydrodynamic escape,…
The coupled interior-atmosphere system of terrestrial exoplanets remains poorly understood. Exoplanets show a wide variety of sizes, densities, surface temperatures, and interior structures, with important knock-on effects for this coupled…
We review several aspects of the calculation of exoplanet model atmospheres in the current era, with a focus on understanding the temperature-pressure profiles of atmospheres and their emitted spectra. Most of the focus is on gas giant…
We are now on a clear trajectory for improvements in exoplanet observations that will revolutionize our ability to characterize their atmospheric structure, composition, and circulation, from gas giants to rocky planets. However, exoplanet…
Observations of time-resolved thermal emission from tidally locked exoplanets can tell us about their atmospheric temperature structure. Telescopes such as JWST and ARIEL will improve the quality and availability of these measurements. This…
Stellar occultations and transits occur when a planetary body passes in front of a star (including our Sun). For objects with an atmosphere, refraction plays an essential role to explain the drops of flux and the aureoles observed during…
The atmospheric circulation in the upper atmosphere of hot Jupiter planets is strongly influenced by the incoming stellar radiation. In this work we explore the results from a 3D atmospheric model and revisit the main processes driving the…
The atmospheres of exoplanets reveal all their properties beyond mass, radius, and orbit. Based on bulk densities, we know that exoplanets larger than 1.5 Earth radii must have gaseous envelopes, hence atmospheres. We discuss contemporary…
Today, we know ~4330 exoplanets orbiting their host stars in ~3200 planetary systems. The diversity of these exoplanets is large, and none of the known exoplanets is a twin to any of the solar system planets, nor is any of the known…
Hot Jupiters are Jupiter-sized exoplanets with close-in orbits, characterized by extreme day-night temperature contrasts due to synchronous rotation. These planets offer unique observational opportunities through transit photometry,…
Planetary rotation rate is a key parameter in determining atmospheric circulation and hence the spatial pattern of clouds. Since clouds can exert a dominant control on planetary radiation balance, rotation rate could be critical for…
Next-generation space telescopes will observe the atmospheres of rocky planets orbiting nearby M-dwarfs. Understanding these observations will require well-developed theory in addition to numerical simulations. Here we present theoretical…
Over the past several decades, thousands of planets have been discovered outside of our Solar System. These planets exhibit enormous diversity, and their large numbers provide a statistical opportunity to place our Solar System within the…
The regimes of possible global atmospheric circulation patterns in an Earth-like atmosphere are explored using a simplified GCM based on the University of Hamburg's Portable University Model for the Atmosphere with simplified (linear)…
Over the past two decades, a coherent picture has emerged of the atmospheric dynamics of hot Jupiters from a combination of three-dimensional general circulation models (GCMs) and astronomical observations. This paradigm consists of hot…
We use thermodynamic calculations to model atmospheric chemistry on terrestrial exoplanets that are hot enough for chemical equilibira between the atmosphere and lithosphere, as on Venus. The results of our calculations place constraints on…