Related papers: Rainy downdrafts in abyssal atmospheres
While Jupiter's massive gas envelope consists mainly of hydrogen and helium, the key to understanding Jupiter's formation and evolution lies in the distribution of the remaining (heavy) elements. Before the Juno mission, the lack of…
Young planetary-mass objects and brown dwarfs near the L/T spectral transition exhibit enhanced spectrophotometric variability over field brown dwarfs. Patchy clouds, auroral processes, stratospheric hot spots, and complex carbon chemistry…
Observations of Jupiter's gravity field by Juno have revealed surprisingly small values for the high order gravitational moments, considering the abundances of heavy elements measured by Galileo 20 years ago. The derivation of recent…
Atmospheric characterisation of temperate sub-Neptunes is the new frontier of exoplanetary science with recent JWST observations of possible Hycean world K2-18b. Accurate modelling of atmospheric processes is essential to interpreting…
The recent gravity field measurements of Jupiter (Juno) and Saturn (Cassini) confirm the existence of deep zonal flows reaching to a depth of 5\% and 15\% of the respective radius. Relating the zonal wind induced density perturbations to…
Water absorption is identified in the atmosphere of HD209458b by comparing models for the planet's transmitted spectrum to recent, multi-wavelength, eclipse-depth measurements (from 0.3 to 1 microns) published by Knutson et al. (2007). A…
Atmospheric refraction affects to various degrees exoplanet transit, lunar eclipse, as well as stellar occultation observations. Exoplanet retrieval algorithms often use analytical expressions for the column abundance along a ray traversing…
The atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn exhibit strong and stable zonal winds. How deep the winds penetrate unabated into each planet is unknown. Our investigation favors shallow winds. It consists of two parts. The first part makes use of an…
A number of transiting exoplanets have featureless transmission spectra that might suggest the presence of clouds at high altitudes. A realistic cloud model is necessary to understand the atmospheric conditions under which such…
The discovery of the near infrared windows into the Venus deep atmosphere has enabled the use of remote sensing techniques to study the composition of the Venus atmosphere below the clouds. In particular, water vapor absorption lines can be…
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…
Moist processes are among the most important drivers of atmospheric dynamics,and scale analysis and asymptotics are cornerstones of theoretical meteorology. Accounting for moist processes in systematic scale analyses therefore seems of…
In the last decades there have been an increasing interest in improving the accuracy of spacecraft navigation and trajectory data. In the course of this plan some anomalies have been found that cannot, in principle, be explained in the…
Layered semi-convection could operate in giant planets, potentially explaining the constraints on the heavy elements distribution in Jupiter deduced recently from Juno observations, and contributing to Saturn's luminosity excess or the…
Juno Microwave Radiometer (MWR) observations of Jupiter's mid-latitudes reveal a strong correlation between brightness temperature contrasts and zonal winds, confirming that the banded structure extends throughout the troposphere. However,…
The new data delivered by NASA's Juno spacecraft significantly increase our understanding of Jupiter's internal dynamics. The gravity data constrain the depth of the zonal flows observed at cloud level and suggest that they slow down…
The temperature structure of a giant planet was traditionally thought to be an adiabat assuming convective mixing homogenizes entropy. The only in-situ measurement made by the Galileo Probe detected a near-adiabatic temperature structure…
The large scale structure of a brown dwarf atmosphere is determined by an interplay of convection, radiation, dust formation, and gravitational settling, which possibly provides an explanation for the observed variability. The result is an…
Jupiter's deep abundances help to constrain the formation history of the planet and the environment of the protoplanetary nebula. Juno recently measured Jupiter's deep oxygen abundance near the equator to be 2.2$_{-2.1}^{+3.9}$ times the…
Meridional circulation regulates the Sun's interior dynamics and magnetism. While it is well accepted that meridional flows are poleward at the Sun's surface, helioseismic observations have yet to provide a definitive answer for the depth…