Related papers: APPLE: An Evolution Code for Modeling Giant Planet…
First generation optical coronagraphic telescopes will obtain images of cool gas and ice giant exoplanets around nearby stars. The albedo spectra of exoplanets at planet-star separations larger than about 1 AU are dominated by reflected…
With the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, we are firmly in the era of exoplanet atmosphere characterization. Understanding exoplanet spectra requires atmospheric chemical and climate models that span the diversity of planetary…
Currently, data-intensive scientific applications require vast amounts of compute resources to deliver world-leading science. The climate emergency has made it clear that unlimited use of resources (e.g., energy) for scientific discovery is…
Giant exoplanets located >1 AU away from their parent stars have atmospheric environments cold enough for water and/or ammonia clouds. We have developed a new equilibrium cloud and reflected light spectrum model, ExoREL, for widely…
The determination of Saturn's atmospheric noble gas abundances are critical to understanding the formation and evolution of Saturn, and giant planets in general. These measurements can only be performed with an entry probe. A Saturn probe…
Since the first discovery of an extra-solar planet around a main-sequence star, in 1995, the number of detected exoplanets has increased enormously. Over the past two decades, observational instruments (both onboard and on ground-based…
Remote sensing observations suffer significant limitations when used to study the bulk atmospheric composition of the giant planets of our solar system. This impacts our knowledge of the formation of these planets and the physics of their…
We know that giant planets played a crucial role in the making of our Solar System. The discovery of giant planets orbiting other stars is a formidable opportunity to learn more about these objects, what is their composition, how various…
Intense X-ray and ultraviolet stellar irradiation can heat and inflate the atmospheres of closely orbiting exoplanets, driving mass outflows that may be significant enough to evaporate a sizable fraction of the planet atmosphere over the…
The discovery of extrasolar planets is one of the major scientific advances of the last two decades. Hundreds of planets have now been detected and astronomers are beginning to characterise their composition and physical characteristics. To…
The giant planets were the first to form and hold the key to unveiling the solar system's formation history in their interiors and atmospheres. Furthermore, the unique conditions present in the interiors of the giant planets make them…
Determining the composition of giant exoplanets is crucial for understanding their origin and evolution. However, the planetary bulk composition is not measured directly but must be deduced from a combination of mass-radius measurements,…
We develop a classification scheme for the evolutionary state of planets based on the non-equilibrium thermodynamics of their coupled systems, including the presence of a biosphere and the possibility of what we call an agency-dominated…
One of the prominent science goal of the ELTs will be to study the physics and mass assembly of galaxies at very high redshifts. Here, we present the galaxy evolution science case for EAGLE, which is a NIR multi-integral field spectrograph…
To aid in the physical interpretation of planetary radii constrained through observations of transiting planets, or eventually direct detections, we compute model radii of pure hydrogen-helium, water, rock, and iron planets, along with…
CODEX, a high resolution, super-stable spectrograph to be fed by the E-ELT, the most powerful telescope ever conceived, will for the first time provide the possibility of directly measuring the change of the expansion rate of the Universe…
The amount and distribution of heavy elements in Jupiter gives indications on the process of its formation and evolution. Core mass and metallicity predictions however depend on the equations of state used, and on model assumptions. We…
The presence of rocky exoplanets with a large refractory carbon inventory is predicted by chemical evolution models of protoplanetary disks of stars with photospheric C/O >0.65, and by models studying the radial transport of refractory…
The ExoMol database (www.exomol.com) provides extensive line lists of molecular transitions which are valid over extended temperatures ranges. The status of the current release of the database is reviewed and a new data structure is…
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…