Scientific Seminars
Evaporating atmospheres of super-Earths, mini-Neptunes, and hot-Jupiters
Francesco Haardt
Universita' degli Studi dell'Insubria
2022-01-11 11:00 Brera - CUPOLA FIORE + Sala virtuale -meet.google.com/voo-iecc-eko
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 system lifetime. In this talk, I will discuss our analysis of a sample of 20 closely orbiting exoplanets. After revising planetary parameters based on the revised parallactic distances from Gaia DR2, by means of the new hydrodynamics code ATES specifically developed by our group, we derived temperature, density, velocity, and ionization structure of highly irradiated planetary primordial atmospheres, along with the current, steady-state mass loss rate. Our results can be understood in terms of basic arguments, and could enable the community to move past the “one-size-fits-all” approach when dealing with the evaporation efficiency of highly irradiated exoplanets. |