Related papers: Evaporation of extrasolar planets
The recent discovery of ``ultra-hot'' ($P < 1$ day) Neptunes has come as a surprise: some of these planets have managed to retain gaseous envelopes despite being close enough to their host stars to trigger strong photoevaporation and/or…
Giant exoplanets orbiting close to their host stars have high temperatures because of the immense stellar irradiation which they receive. The extreme energy input leads to the expansion of the atmosphere and the escape of neutral hydrogen.…
The detections of atomic hydrogen, heavy atoms and ions surrounding the extrasolar giant planet (EGP) HD209458b constrain the composition, temperature and density profiles in its upper atmosphere. Thus the observations provide guidance for…
High-resolution spectroscopy (HRS) has grown into one of the main techniques to characterise the atmospheres of extrasolar planets. High spectral resolving power allows for the efficient removal of telluric and host-star contamination.…
Observations using the Spitzer Space Telescope provided the first detections of photons from extrasolar planets. Spitzer observations are allowing us to infer the temperature structure, composition, and dynamics of exoplanet atmospheres.…
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…
The discovery of transiting "super-Earths" with inflated radii and known masses such as Kepler-11b-f, GJ 1214b and 55 Cnc e, indicates that these exoplanets did not lose their nebula-captured hydrogen-rich, degassed or impact-delivered…
Observations of transits of the hot giant exoplanet HD 189733b in the unresolved HI Lyman-alpha line show signs of hydrogen escaping the upper atmosphere of the planet. New resolved Lyman-alpha observations obtained with the STIS…
We present Spitzer Space Telescope infrared photometric time series of the transiting extrasolar planet system TrES-1. The data span a predicted time of secondary eclipse, corresponding to the passage of the planet behind the star. In both…
Two decades after the discovery of 51 Peg b, the formation processes and atmospheres of short-period gas giants remain poorly understood. Observations of eccentric systems provide key insights on those topics as they can illuminate how a…
Atmospheric escape is key to explaining the long-term evolution of planets in our Solar System and beyond, and in the interpretation of atmospheric measurements. Hydrodynamic escape is generally thought to be driven by the flux of extreme…
Absorption of high-energy radiation in planetary thermospheres is believed to lead to the formation of planetary winds. The resulting mass-loss rates can affect the evolution, particularly of small gas planets. We present 1D, spherically…
The search for extrasolar rocky planets has already found the first transiting rocky super-Earth, Corot 7b, with a surface temperature that allows for magma oceans. Here we ask if we could distinguish rocky planets with recent major…
Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a key chemical species that is found in a wide range of planetary atmospheres. In the context of exoplanets, CO2 is an indicator of the metal enrichment (i.e., elements heavier than helium, also called…
Many extrasolar planets orbit closely to their parent star. Their existence raises the fundamental problem of loss and gain in their mass. For exoplanet HD209458b, reports on an unusually extended hydrogen corona and a hot layer in the…
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…
Water, methane and carbon-monoxide are expected to be among the most abundant molecules besides molecular hydrogen in the hot atmosphere of close-in EGPs. Transit observations in the mid-IR allow the atmospheric content of transiting…
In recent years the focus of exoplanet research has shifted from the mere detection to detailed characterization. Precise measurements of the masses and radii of transiting planets have shown that some low-mass planets have extended…
We study the evaporation of planets orbiting close to hot (extreme) horizontal branch (EHB) stars. These planets survived the common envelope phase inside the envelope of the reg giant star progenitor. We find that Jupiter-like planets…
A multi-fluid model for an atomic hydrogen-proton mixture in the upper atmosphere of extrosolar planet is presented when the continuity and momentum equations of each component have been already solved with an energy equation. The particle…