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Related papers: Outflowing helium from a mature mini-Neptune

200 papers

Early in their lives, planets endure extreme amounts of ionizing radiation from their host stars. For planets with primordial hydrogen and helium-rich envelopes, this can lead to substantial mass loss. Direct observations of atmospheric…

TOI-431 system has 3 close-in exoplanets, which gives an ideal lab to study gas escape. In this study, we measure the XUV luminosity for TOI-431 with XMM-Newton/EPIC-pn and OM data, then calculate the fluxes for the planets in the system.…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2025-02-17 Xiaoming Jiang , Jonathan H. Jiang , Remo Burn , Zong-Hong Zhu

K2-18 b is a transiting mini-Neptune that orbits a nearby (38 pc) cool M3 dwarf and is located inside its region of temperate irradiation. We report on the search for hydrogen escape from the atmosphere K2-18 b using Lyman-$\alpha$ transit…

Transits in the H I 1216 A (Lyman alpha), O I 1334 A, C II 1335 A, and Si III 1206.5 A lines constrain the properties of the upper atmosphere of HD209458b. In addition to probing the temperature and density profiles in the thermosphere,…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2015-06-11 T. T. Koskinen , R. V. Yelle , M. J. Harris , P. Lavvas

We present the discovery of TOI-2136b, a sub-Neptune planet transiting every 7.85 days a nearby M4.5V-type star, identified through photometric measurements from the TESS mission. The host star is located $33$ pc away with a radius of…

Hot gas giant exoplanets can lose part of their atmosphere due to strong stellar irradiation, affecting their physical and chemical evolution. Studies of atmospheric escape from exoplanets have mostly relied on space-based observations of…

While the population of confirmed exoplanets continues to grow, the sample of confirmed transiting planets around evolved stars is still limited. We present the discovery and confirmation of a hot Jupiter orbiting TOI-2184 (TIC 176956893),…

Transmission spectroscopy to date has detected atomic and molecular absorption in Jupiter-sized exoplanets, but intense efforts to measure molecular absorption in the atmospheres of smaller (Neptune-sized) planets during transits have…

Hydrogen gas evaporating from the atmosphere of the hot-Neptune GJ436b absorbs over 50% of the stellar Ly$\alpha$ emission during transit. Given the planet's atmospheric composition and energy-limited escape rate, this hydrogen outflow is…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2017-01-18 R. O. Parke Loyd , T. T. Koskinen , Kevin France , Christian Schneider , Seth Redfield

Small-sized exoplanets in tight orbits around young stars (10-1000 Myr) give us the opportunity to investigate the mechanisms that led to their formation, the evolution of their physical and orbital properties and, especially, of their…

Observational evidence for escaping exoplanet atmospheres has been obtained for a few exoplanets to date. It comes from strong transit signals detected in the ultraviolet, most notably in the wings of the hydrogen Lyman-$\alpha$…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2018-03-08 Antonija Oklopčić , Christopher M. Hirata

Short-period sub-Neptunes are common in extrasolar systems. These sub-Neptunes are generally thought to have primary atmospheres of protoplanetary-disk gas origin. However, atmospheric escape followed by degassing from their interiors can…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2025-11-21 Issei Kobayashi , Hiroyuki Kurokawa , Laura Schaefer , Satoshi Okuzumi

TOI-1695 is a V-mag=13 M-dwarf star from the northern hemisphere at 45$\,$pc from the Sun, around which a 3.134-day periodic transit signal from a super-Earth candidate was identified in TESS photometry. With a transit depth of 1.3$\,$mmag,…

We present the detection of helium in the extended atmosphere of the sub-Saturn WASP-107b using high resolution ($R \approx 25000$) near-infrared spectra from Keck II/NIRSPEC. We find peak excess absorption of $7.26 \pm 0.24\%$ (30$\sigma$)…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2020-03-04 James Kirk , Munazza K. Alam , Mercedes Lopez-Morales , Li Zeng

The near-infrared helium triplet line is a powerful tool for studying atmospheric escape processes of close-in exoplanets, especially irradiated gas giants. Line profile fitting provides direct insight into the mechanisms driving…

We report the detection of GJ 3090 b (TOI-177.01), a mini-Neptune on a 2.9-day orbit transiting a bright (K = 7.3 mag) M2 dwarf located at 22 pc. The planet was identified by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and was confirmed with…

Atmospheric escape shapes the fate of exoplanets, with statistical evidence for transformative mass loss imprinted across the mass-radius-insolation distribution. Here we present transit spectroscopy of the highly irradiated, low-gravity,…