Related papers: Revisiting the barometric equation and the extent …
An objective revision of the Laplace barometric formula for isothermal planetary atmospheres is proposed. From Clausius virial theorem equating the root mean square kinetic energy to half the gravitational potential energy, planetary…
The air density on earth decays as a function of altitude $z$ approximately according to an $\exp(-w\,z/\theta)$-law, where $w$ denotes the weight of a nitrogen molecule and $\theta=\kB T$ where $k_B$ is a constant and $T$ the thermodynamic…
During their formation, planets form large, hot atmospheres due to the ongoing accretion of solids. It has been customary to assume that all solids end up at the center constituting a "core" of refractory materials, whereas the envelope…
Planets acquire atmospheres from their parent circumstellar disks. We derive a general analytic expression for how the atmospheric mass grows with time $t$, as a function of the underlying core mass $M_{\rm core}$ and nebular conditions,…
Atmospheric mass loss is a fundamental phenomenon shaping the structure and evolution of planetary atmospheres. It can engage processes ranging from global interactions with the host star and large-scale hydrodynamic outflows to essentially…
Recent advances in our understanding of the dynamical history of the Solar system have altered the inferred bombardment history of the Earth during accretion of the Late Veneer, after the Moon-forming impact. We investigate how the…
We consider planets composed of water ice and rock, located far from a central star. In an earlier study, computing the growth of planets by continuous accretion, we found that a large fraction of the ice evaporates upon accretion, creating…
Planetary atmospheres, and models of them, are discussed from the viewpoint of condensed matter physics. Atmospheres are a form of condensed matter, and many interesting phenomena of condensed matter systems are realized by them. The…
We derive the approximate pressure profiles, density profiles, and temperature profiles of an atmosphere, also called barometric formulas. Our variant of a derivation goes beyond the common standard exercise of a thermodynamics lecture,…
The climate and circulation of a terrestrial planet are governed by, among other things, the distance to its host star, its size, rotation rate, obliquity, atmospheric composition and gravity. Here we explore the effects of the last of…
We study the long-term dynamics of a planetary system composed of a star and a planet. Both bodies are considered as extended, non-spherical, rotating objects. There are no assumptions made on the relative angles between the orbital angular…
The long-term evolution of hydrogen-dominated atmospheres of sub-Neptune-like planets is mostly controlled by two factors: a slow dissipation of the gravitational energy acquired at the formation (known as thermal evolution) and atmospheric…
We present a simplified model of the atmosphere of a terrestrial planet as an open two-dimensional system described by an ideal gas with velocity $\vec{v}$, density $\rho$ and temperature $T$ fields. Starting with the Chern-Simons equations…
We present a new scaling law to predict the loss of atmosphere from planetary collisions for any speed, angle, impactor mass, target mass, and body compositions, in the regime of giant impacts onto broadly terrestrial planets with…
Most exoplanets with a few Earth radii are more inflated than bare-rock planets with the same mass, indicating a substantial volatile amount. Neither the origin of the volatiles nor the planet's bulk composition can be constrained from the…
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…
Recent theoretical, numerical, and observational work have suggested that when a growing planet opens a gap in its disk the flow of gas into the gap is dominated by gas falling vertically from a height of at least one gas scale height. Our…
Wind erosion is a destructive mechanism that completely dissolves a weakly bound object like a planetesimal into its constituent particles, if the velocity relative to the ambient gas and the local gas pressure are sufficiently high. In…
White dwarfs with metal-polluted atmospheres have been studied widely in the context of the accretion of rocky debris from evolved planetary systems. One open question is the geometry of accretion and how material arrives and mixes in the…
We use hydrodynamic simulations to examine how the baryonic components of galaxies are assembled, focusing on the relative importance of mergers and smooth accretion in the formation of ~L_* systems. In our primary simulation, which models…