Related papers: The water abundance in Jupiter's equatorial zone
Understanding the set of conditions that allow rocky planets to have liquid water on their surface -- in the form of lakes, seas or oceans -- is a major scientific step to determine the fraction of planets potentially suitable for the…
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…
The extra-solar planet HD209458b has been found to have an extended atmosphere of escaping atomic hydrogen (Vidal-Madjar et al. 2003), suggesting that ``hot Jupiters'' closer to their parent stars could evaporate. Here we estimate the…
The standard model for giant planet formation is based on the accretion of solids by a growing planetary embryo, followed by rapid gas accretion once the planet exceeds a so-called critical mass. The dominant size of the accreted solids…
Icy bodies may have delivered the oceans to the early Earth, yet little is known about water in the ice-dominated regions of extra-solar planet-forming disks. The Heterodyne Instrument for the Far-Infrared on-board the Herschel Space…
Water photolysis and hydrogen loss from the upper atmospheres of terrestrial planets is of fundamental importance to climate evolution but remains poorly understood in general. Here we present a range of calculations we performed to study…
An understanding of the abundance and distribution of water vapor in the innermost region of protoplanetary disks is key to understanding the origin of habitable worlds and planetary systems. Past observations have shown H2O to be abundant…
Jupiter's banded structure undergoes strong temporal variations, changing the visible and infrared appearance of the belts and zones in a complex and turbulent way due to physical processes that are not yet understood. In this study we use…
Phase separation between hydrogen and helium at high pressures and temperatures leads to the rainout of helium in the deep interiors of Jupiter and Saturn. This process, also known as "helium rain", affects their long-term evolution.…
Models of planet formation have shown that giant planets have a large impact on the number, masses and orbits of terrestrial planets that form. In addition, they play an important role in delivering volatiles from material that formed…
Nitrogen is the most common element in Earth's atmosphere and also appears to be present in significant amounts in the mantle. However, its long-term cycling between these two reservoirs remains poorly understood. Here a range of biotic and…
We present the first X-ray observation of Jupiter by XMM-Newton. Images taken with the EPIC cameras show prominent emission, essentially all confined to the 0.2-2.0 keV band, from the planet's auroral spots; their spectra can be modelled…
We report the first detection of the ground transition of the deuterated water at 464 GHz in the young proto-planetary disk surrounding the solar type protostar DM Tau. The line is observed in absorption against the continuum from the cold…
Idealized protoplanetary disk and giant planet formation models have been interpreted to suggest that a giant planet's atmospheric abundances can be used to infer its formation location in its parent protoplanetary disk. It has recently…
The flybys of Jupiter by the Voyager spacecraft in 1979, and over two decades later by Cassini in 2000, have provided us with unique datasets from two different epochs, allowing the investigation of seasonal change in the atmosphere. In…
The origin of hot Jupiters -- gas giant exoplanets orbiting very close to their host stars -- is a long-standing puzzle. Planet formation theories suggest that such planets are unlikely to have formed in-situ but instead may have formed at…
The elemental compositions of planet hosting stars serve as proxies for the primordial compositions of the protoplanetary disks within which the planets form. The temperature profile of the disk governs the condensation fronts of various…
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…
A comprehensive exploration of Uranus and Neptune is essential to understand the formation and evolution of the giant planets, in particular, solar system, in general, and, by extension, a vast population of exoplanets. Though core…
The equation of state of hydrogen, helium, and water effects interior structure models of giant planets significantly. We present a new equation of state data table, LM-REOS, generated by large scale quantum molecular dynamics simulations…