Related papers: Jupiter's Occultation Radii: Implications for its …
Recent observations have revealed two new classes of planetary orbits. Rossiter- Mclaughlin (RM) measurements have revealed hot Jupiters in high-obliquity orbits. In addition, direct-imaging has discovered giant planets at large (~ 100 AU)…
Jupiter's weather layer exhibits long-term and quasi-periodic cycles of meteorological activity that can completely change the appearance of its belts and zones. There are cycles with intervals from 4 to 9 years, dependent on the latitude,…
A point mass at the center of an ellipsoidal homogeneous fluid is used as a simple model to study the effect of rotation on the shape and external gravitational field of planets and stars. Maclaurin's analytical result for a homogenous body…
Jupiter's bright persistent polar aurora and Earth's dark polar region indicate that the planets' magnetospheric topologies are very different. High-resolution global simulations show that the reconnection rate at the interface between the…
Tidal dissipation may be important for the internal evolution as well as the orbits of short-period massive planets--hot Jupiters. We revisit a mechanism proposed by Ogilvie and Lin for tidal forcing of inertial waves, which are…
The observed low densities of gas giant planets with a high equilibrium temperature can be simulated in models when a fraction of the surface radiation is deposited deeper in the interior. Meanwhile migration theories suggest that hot…
The surface winds of Jupiter and Saturn are primarily zonal. Each planet exhibits strong prograde equatorial flow flanked by multiple alternating zonal winds at higher latitudes. The depth to which these flows penetrate has long been…
We investigate the effects of atmospheric circulation on the chemistry of the hot Jupiter HD 209458b. We use a simplified dynamical model and a robust chemical network, as opposed to previous studies which have used a three dimensional…
Measuring the obliquity distribution of stars hosting warm Jupiters may help us to understand the formation of close-orbiting gas giants. Few such measurements have been performed due to practical difficulties in scheduling observations of…
The internal structure of Jupiter is constrained by the precise gravity field measurements by NASA's Juno mission, atmospheric data from the Galileo entry probe, and Voyager radio occultations. Not only are these observations few compared…
The mean zonal flow observed on Jupiter consists of an intricate pattern of jets, or bands of zonal flow moving prograde or retrograde compared to the bulk planetary rotation. The strongest flow is a superrotating (prograde) jet near the…
Jupiter's fast rotation - one rotation over 10 hours - creates strong jet streams, smearing its clouds into linear bands of dark and light zonal belts that circle the planet on lines of almost constant latitude. Such a high degree of…
Tidally locked gas giants are typically in several-day orbits, implying a modest role for rotation in the atmospheric circulation. Nevertheless, there exist a class of gas-giant, highly irradiated objects---brown dwarfs orbiting white…
Close-in extrasolar gas giants -- the hot Jupiters -- display departures in radius above the zero-temperature solution, the radius excess, that are anomalously high. The radius excess of hot Jupiters follows a relatively close relation with…
The field of exoplanetary science has seen discovery rates increase dramatically over recent years, due largely to the data from the Kepler mission. Even so, individual discoveries of planets orbiting nearby stars are very important for…
It has long been thought that the presence of a giant planet is a pre-requisite for the development of life on potentially habitable planets. Without Jupiter, it was argued, the Earth would have been subject to a punishing impact regime,…
We study the response of hot Jupiters to a static tidal perturbation using the Concentric MacLaurin Spheroid (CMS) method. For strongly irradiated planets, we first performed radiative transfer calculations to relate the planet's…
(Abridged) The solar system gas giant planets are oblate due to their rapid rotation. A measurement of the planet's projected oblateness would constrain the planet's rotational period. Planets that are synchronously rotating with their…
We perform a linear analysis to investigate the dynamical response of a non-synchronized hot Jupiter to stellar irradiation. In this work, we consider the diurnal Fourier harmonic of the stellar irradiation acting at the top of a radiative…
The thermal structure of planetary atmospheres is an essential input for predicting and retrieving the distribution of gases and aerosols, as well as the bulk chemical abundances. In the case of Jupiter, the temperature at a reference level…