Related papers: The Interior Structure, Composition, and Evolution…
Several transiting super-Earths are expected to be discovered in the coming few years. While tools to model the interior structure of transiting planets exist, inferences about the composition are fraught with ambiguities. We present a…
We consider the origin of compact, short-period, Jupiter-mass planets. We propose that their diverse structure is caused by giant impacts of embryos and super-Earths or mergers with other gas giants during the formation and evolution of…
We study the formation of a giant gas planet by the core--accretion gas--capture process, with numerical simulations, under the assumption that the planetary core forms in the center of an anti-cyclonic vortex. The presence of the vortex…
Remote sensing observations meet some limitations when used to study the bulk atmospheric composition of the giant planets of our solar system. A remarkable example of the superiority of in situ probe measurements is illustrated by the…
Reproducing Uranus and Neptune remains a challenge for simulations of solar system formation. The ice giants' peculiar obliquities suggest that they both suffered giant collisions during their formation. Thus, there must have been an epoch…
The observed masses and radii of sub-Neptunes are typically explained by the gas dwarf and the water world scenarios. While their evolutionary history on a population level has been proposed as a method to distinguish between these…
Giant planets are believed to host central dense rocky/icy cores that are key actors in the core-accretion scenario for their formation. In the same time, some of their components are unstable in the temperature and pressure regimes of…
GJ 436b is the first extrasolar planet discovered that resembles Neptune in mass and radius. The particularly interesting property of Neptune-sized planets is that their mass Mp and radius Rp are close to theoretical M-R relations of water…
The intrinsic luminosity of Uranus is a factor of 10 less than that of Neptune, an observation that standard giant planetary evolution models, which assume negligible viscosity, fail to capture. Here we show that more than half of the…
Exoplanet discoveries of recent years have provided a great deal of new data for studying the bulk compositions of giant planets. Here we identify 47 transiting giant planets ($20 M_\oplus < M < 20 M_{\mathrm{J}}$) whose stellar insolation…
Transit surveys combined with Doppler data have revealed a class of gas giant planets that are massive and highly enriched in heavy elements (e.g., HD149026b, GJ436b, and HAT-P-20b). It is tempting to consider these planets as validation of…
Observations of Jupiter's gravity field by Juno have revealed surprisingly small values for the high order gravitational moments, considering the abundances of heavy elements measured by Galileo 20 years ago. The derivation of recent…
The key to understanding an extrasolar giant planet's spectrum--and hence its detectability and evolution--lies with its atmosphere. Now that direct observations of thermal emission from extrasolar giant planets are in hand, atmosphere…
The discovery of multiple transiting planetary systems offers new possibilities for characterising exoplanets and understanding their formation. The Kepler-9 system contains two Saturn-mass planets, Kepler-9b and 9c. Using evolution models…
We investigate the orbital evolution of planetesimals in the inner disk in the presence of nebula gas and a (proto-) cold Jupiter. By varying the mass, eccentricity, and semi-major axis of the planet, we study the dependence of the relative…
We predict the carbon-to-oxygen (C/O) ratios in the hydrogen-helium envelope and atmospheres of a sample of nearly 50 relatively cool ($T_{\mathrm eq}<$ 1000 K) transiting gas giant planets. The method involves planetary envelope…
In an ongoing effort to understand planet formation the link between the chemistry of the protoplanetary disk and the properties of resulting planets have long been a subject of interest. These connections have generally been made between…
The weather layers of the gas giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn, comprise the shallow atmospheric layers that are influenced energetically by a combination of incoming solar radiation and localised latent heating of condensates, as well as…
It is already stated in the previous studies that the radius of the giant planets is affected by stellar irradiation. The confirmed relation between radius and incident flux depends on planetary mass intervals. In this study, we show that…
Future instruments like NIRCam and MIRI on JWST or METIS at the ELT will be able to image exoplanets that are too faint for current direct imaging instruments. Evolutionary models predicting the planetary intrinsic luminosity as a function…