Related papers: Atmospheric escape from exoplanets: recent observa…
Advancements in our understanding of exoplanetary atmospheres, from massive gas giants down to rocky worlds, depend on the constructive challenges between observations and models. We are now on a clear trajectory for improvements in…
With more than a dozen significant detections, the helium triplet has emerged as a key tracer of evaporating exoplanet atmospheres. This near-infrared feature can be observed from the ground and holds great promise, especially with upcoming…
The discovery of planets orbiting stars other than the Sun has accelerated over the past decade, and this trend will continue as new space- and ground-based observatories employ next-generation instrumentation to search the skies for…
The presence of an atmosphere over sufficiently long timescales is widely perceived as one of the most prominent criteria associated with planetary surface habitability. We address the crucial question as to whether the seven Earth-sized…
The hydrodynamic escape driven by external or internal energy sources sculpts the population of low mass close-in planets. However, distinguishing between the driving mechanisms responsible for the hydrodynamic escape of hydrogen-rich…
Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) driven atmospheric escape is a key process in the atmospheric evolution of close-in exoplanets. In many evolutionary models, the energy-limited mass-loss rate with a constant efficiency (typically $\sim10\%$) is…
Hydrodynamic atmospheric escape plays a central role in shaping the demographics of small, close-in exoplanets. Two mechanisms have been proposed to drive mass loss: photoevaporation, powered by UV irradiation, and core-powered mass loss,…
The extra-solar planet HD209458b has been found to have an extended atmosphere of escaping atomic hydrogen (Vidal-Madjar et al. 2003), suggesting that ``hot Jupiters'' closer to their parent stars could evaporate. Here we estimate the…
Astronomical surveys have identified numerous exoplanets with bulk compositions that are unlike the planets of the Solar System, including rocky super-Earths and gas-enveloped sub-Neptunes. Observing the atmospheres of these objects…
Climate transitions on exoplanets offer valuable insights into the atmospheric processes governing planetary habitability. Previous pure-steam atmospheric models show a thermal limit in outgoing long-wave radiation, which has been used to…
The results of large-scale exoplanet transit surveys indicate that the distribution of small planet radii is likely sculpted by atmospheric loss. Several possible physical mechanisms exist for this loss of primordial atmospheres, each of…
Chemical kinetics plays an important role in controlling the atmospheric composition of all planetary atmospheres, including those of extrasolar planets. For the hottest exoplanets, the composition can closely follow…
Young terrestrial planets, when they are still embedded in a circumstellar disk, accumulate an atmosphere of nebula gas. The evolution and eventual evaporation of the protoplanetary disk affect the structure and dynamics of the planetary…
Stellar occultations and transits occur when a planetary body passes in front of a star (including our Sun). For objects with an atmosphere, refraction plays an essential role to explain the drops of flux and the aureoles observed during…
Characterization of exoplanets has matured in recent years, particularly through studies of exoplanetary atmospheres of transiting planets at infra-red wavelenegths. The primary source for such observations has been the Spitzer Space…
In this Letter, we make use of sophisticated 3D numerical simulations to assess the extent of atmospheric ion and photochemical losses from Mars over time. We demonstrate that the atmospheric ion escape rates were significantly higher (by…
Upper atmospheres of Hot Jupiters are subject to extreme radiation conditions that can result in rapid atmospheric escape. The composition and structure of the upper atmospheres of these planets are affected by the high-energy spectrum of…
The recent detections of temperate terrestrial planets orbiting nearby stars and the promise of characterizing their atmospheres motivates a need to understand how the diversity of possible planetary parameters affects the climate of…
Exoplanet properties depend on how well the host star is characterized. For instance, the stellar atmospheric parameters (i.e., effective temperature, surface gravity and overall metallicity) are needed to derive the stellar mass and radius…
Most our knowledge about rocky exoplanets is based on their measure of mass and radius. These two parameters are routinely measured and are used to categorise different populations of observed exoplanets. They are also tightly linked to the…