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Jupiter's gravity field observed by NASA's Juno spacecraft indicates that the density in the 10--100 GPa region is lower than one would expect from a H/He adiabat with 0.5-5x solar water abundance as has been observationally inferred in…
Polar vortices are common in the atmospheres of rapidly rotating planets [1-4]. On Earth and Mars they are tied to the surface and their existence follows the seasonal insolation cycle [1-3]. Venus is a slowly rotating planet but it is also…
We study the feasibility of observationally constraining the rotation rate of hot Jupiters, planets that are typically assumed to have been tidally locked into synchronous rotation. We use a three-dimensional General Circulation Model to…
When the Sun ascends the red giant branch (RGB), its luminosity will increase and all the planets will receive much greater irradiation than they do now. Jupiter, in particular, might end up more highly irradiated than the hot Neptune GJ…
Rotational modulations are observed on brown dwarfs and directly imaged exoplanets, but the underlying mechanism is not well understood. Here, we analyze Jupiter's rotational light curves at 12 wavelengths from the ultraviolet (UV) to the…
Context. The tropospheric wind pattern in Jupiter consists of alternating prograde and retrograde zonal jets with typical velocities of up to 100 m/s around the equator. At much higher altitudes, in the ionosphere, strong auroral jets have…
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…
Argon, krypton, xenon, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus have all been measured enriched by a quasi uniform factor in the 2--4 range, compared to their protosolar values, in the atmosphere of Jupiter. To elucidate the origin of these…
The study of exoplanet atmospheres showed large diversity compared to the planets in our solar system. Especially Jupiter type exoplanets orbiting their host star in close orbits, the so-called hot and ultra-hot Jupiters, have been studied…
Zonal flows in rapidly-rotating celestial objects such as the Sun, gas or ice giants form in a variety of surface patterns and amplitudes. Whereas the differential rotation on the Sun, Jupiter and Saturn features a super-rotating equatorial…
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…
The orbital structure of the asteroid belt holds a record of the Solar System's dynamical history. The current belt only contains ${\rm \sim 10^{-3}}$ Earth masses yet the asteroids' orbits are dynamically excited, with a large spread in…
Short-period gas giants (hot Jupiters) on circular orbits are expected to be tidally locked into synchronous rotation, with permanent daysides that face their host stars, and permanent nightsides that face the darkness of space. Thermal…
The Trojan asteroids orbit about the Lagrangian points of Jupiter and the residence times about their present location are very long for most of them. If these bodies originated in the outer Solar System, they should be mainly composed of…
Saturn has an intense and broad eastward equatorial jet with a complex three-dimensional structure mixed with time variability. The equatorial region experiences strong seasonal insolation variations enhanced by ring shadowing and three of…
We have obtained high-resolution spectra of Jupiter's Great Red Spot (GRS) between 4.6 and 5.4 microns using telescopes on Mauna Kea in order to derive gas abundances and to constrain its cloud structure between 0.5 and 5~bars. We used line…
We present results from an atmospheric circulation study of nine hot Jupiters that comprise a large transmission spectral survey using the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes. These observations exhibit a range of spectral behavior over…
I present results from the first global hydrodynamical simulations of the elliptical instability in a tidally deformed gaseous planet (or star) with a free surface. The elliptical instability is potentially important for tidal evolution of…
As a rule, the orbital velocities of "hot Jupiters," i.e., exoplanets with masses comparable to the mass of Jupiter and orbital semi-major axes less than 0.1 AU, are supersonic relative to the stellar wind, resulting in the formation of a…
Small-scale waves were observed along the boundary between Jupiter's North Equatorial Belt and North Tropical Zone, ~16.5{\deg} N planetographic latitude in Hubble Space Telescope data in 2012 and throughout 2015 to 2018, observable at all…