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The water abundance in a planetary atmosphere provides a key constraint on the planet's primordial origins because water ice is expected to play an important role in the core accretion model of planet formation. However, the water content…
Studies of planetary atmospheric composition, variability, and evolution require appropriate theoretical and numerical tools to estimate key atmospheric parameters, among which the mass-loss rate is often the most important. In evolutionary…
Modeling the interior of a rocky or water-rich exoplanet is a thermodynamic closure problem: every layer's density, temperature gradient, and phase must follow from an equation of state (EoS) that remains self-consistent across the…
In the last few years astronomical surveys have expanded the reach of planetary science into the realm of small and dense extrasolar worlds. These share a number of characteristics with the terrestrial and icy planetary objects of the Solar…
Cold super-Earths which retain their primordial, H-He dominated atmosphere could have surfaces that are warm enough to host liquid water. This would be due to the collision induced absorption (CIA) of infra-red light by hydrogen, which…
The increasing number of super-Earths close to their host stars revealed a scarcity of close-in small planets with 1.5-2.0$\,R_\oplus$ in the radius distribution of ${\it Kepler}$ planets. The atmospheric escape of super-Earths by…
The majority of discovered exoplanetary systems harbour a new class of planets, bodies typically several times more massive than Earth but orbiting their host stars well inside the orbit of Mercury. The origin of these close-in super-Earths…
As a first step toward a multi-phase equation of state for dense water, we develop a temperature-dependent equation of state for dense water covering the liquid and plasma regimes and extending to the super-ionic and gas regimes. This…
Several short-period Jupiter-mass planets have been discovered around nearby solar-type stars. During the circularization of their orbits, the dissipation of tidal disturbance by their host stars heats the interior and inflates the sizes of…
Planets with 2 $R_{\oplus}$ < $R$ < 3 $R_{\oplus}$ and orbital period $<$100 d are abundant; these sub-Neptune exoplanets are not well understood. For example, $Kepler$ sub-Neptunes are likely to have deep magma oceans in contact with their…
Mass and radius are two fundamental properties for characterising exoplanets, but only for a relatively small fraction of exoplanets are they both available. Mass is often derived from radial velocity measurements, while the radius is…
Several observational works have shown the existence of Jupiter-mass planets covering a wide range of semi-major axes around Sun-like stars. We aim to analyse the planetary formation processes around Sun-like stars that host a Jupiter-mass…
Exoplanets with substantial Hydrogen/Helium atmospheres have been discovered in abundance, many residing extremely close to their parent stars. The extreme irradiation levels these atmospheres experience causes them to undergo hydrodynamic…
The population of close-in super-Earths, with gas mass fractions of up to 10% represents a challenge for planet formation theory: how did they avoid runaway gas accretion and collapsing to hot Jupiters despite their core masses being in the…
Studying the habitability, internal structure and composition of exoplanets is crucial for understanding their potential to sustain life beyond our solar system. Characterizing planetary structures and atmospheric evolution provides…
The recent discovery and initial characterization of sub-Neptune-sized exoplanets that receive stellar irradiance of approximately Earth's raised the prospect of finding habitable planets in the coming decade, because some of these…
Data suggest that most rocky exoplanets with orbital period $p$ $<$ 100 d ("hot" rocky exoplanets) formed as gas-rich sub-Neptunes that subsequently lost most of their envelopes, but whether these rocky exoplanets still have atmospheres is…
A giant planet embedded in a protoplanetary disk creates a gap. This process is important for both theory and observations. Using results of a survey for a wide parameter range with two-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations, we constructed…
The planetary mass-radius diagram is an observational result of central importance to understand planet formation. We present an updated version of our planet formation model based on the core accretion paradigm which allows to calculate…
In principle, the combined measurements of the mass and radius a giant exoplanet allow one to determine the relative fraction of hydrogen and helium and of heavy elements in the planet. However, uncertainties on the underlying physics imply…