On the Cool Side: Modeling the Atmospheres of Brown Dwarfs and Giant Planets

By M. Marley, T. Robinson. 2014

189 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The atmosphere of a brown dwarf or extrasolar giant planet controls the spectrum of radiation emitted by the object and regulates its cooling over time. Although the study of these atmospheres has been informed by decades of experience modeling stellar and planetary atmospheres, the distinctive characteristics of these objects present unique challenges to forward modeling. In particular, complex chemistry arising from molecule-rich atmospheres, molecular opacity line lists (sometimes running to 10 billion absorption lines or more), multiple cloud-forming condensates, and disequilibrium chemical processes all combine to create a challenging task for any modeling effort. This review describes the process of incorporating these complexities into one-dimensional radiative-convective equilibrium models of substellar objects. We discuss the underlying mathematics as well as the techniques used to model the physics, chemistry, radiative transfer, and other processes relevant to understanding these atmospheres. T...

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/137acac729b9bcefe3845d06635ded11ed97f087

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Instrumentation

Citations in the corpus

Equilibrium chemistry down to 100 K (2017, background): “To date, applications of thermo-chemical equilibrium are widespread in astronomy, for example in gas giant planet atmospheres, brown dwarfs and low-mass dwarf stars (Allard & Hauschildt 1995; Tsuji et al. 1996; Lodders & Fegley 2002; Visscher et al. 2010; Marley & Robinson 2015).”
Imaging Extrasolar Giant Planets (2016, background): “…Helled et al. 2013; Chabrier et al. 2014; Helling et al. 2014), atmospheric models (Marley et al. 2007a; Helling et al. 2008, Allard et al. 2012; Marley & Robinson 2015), evolutionary models, (Burrows et al. 2001; Fortney & Nettelmann 2009), observational results (Absil & Mawet 2009; Lagrange…”
Exoplanetary Atmospheres: Key Insights, Challenges, and Prospects (2019, background): “Detailed reviews on models of clouds/hazes in exoplanetary and sub-stellar atmospheres can be found in (173, 163).”
Individual Dynamical Masses of Ultracool Dwarfs (2017, background): “Broadly speaking, the interior physics of evolutionary models over this time has remained the same, while the treatment of the surface boundary conditions has advanced greatly due to improved molecular line lists, chemistry, and cloud modeling (see a recent review by Marley & Robinson 2015).”
Retrieving scattering clouds and disequilibrium chemistry in the atmosphere of HR 8799e (2020, background): “…radiative transfer is carried out using the cumulative probability of the opacity distribution function as the spectral coordinate, and assuming that different probability values map to the same wavelength in all atmospheric layers (e.g., Lacis & Oinas 1991; Fu & Liou 1992; Marley & Robinson 2015).”