GASEOUS MEAN OPACITIES FOR GIANT PLANET AND ULTRACOOL DWARF ATMOSPHERES OVER A RANGE OF METALLICITIES AND TEMPERATURES

By R. Freedman, J. Lustig-Yaeger, Jon Fortney, R. Lupu, M. Marley, K. Lodders. 2014

262 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present new calculations of Rosseland and Planck gaseous mean opacities relevant to the atmospheres of giant planets and ultracool dwarfs. Such calculations are used in modeling the atmospheres, interiors, formation, and evolution of these objects. Our calculations are an expansion of those presented in Freedman et al. to include lower pressures, finer temperature resolution, and also the higher metallicities most relevant for giant planet atmospheres. Calculations span 1 μbar to 300 bar, and 75–4000 K, in a nearly square grid. Opacities at metallicities from solar to 50 times solar abundances are calculated. We also provide an analytic fit to the Rosseland mean opacities over the grid in pressure, temperature, and metallicity. In addition to computing mean opacities at these local temperatures, we also calculate them with weighting functions up to 7000 K, to simulate the mean opacities for incident stellar intensities, rather than locally thermally emitted intensities. The chemical equilibrium calculations account for the settling of condensates in a gravitational field and are applicable to cloud-free giant planet and ultracool dwarf atmospheres, but not circumstellar disks. We provide our extensive opacity tables for public use.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/43fbad188c6f2dedaaab3e7e797a257a37407ce4

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. N. Madhusudhan
2. Jon Fortney
3. M. Line
4. V. Parmentier
5. A. Showman
6. Laura Kreidberg
7. M. Marley
8. J. D'esert

Citations in the corpus

• From thermal dissociation to condensation in the atmospheres of ultra hot Jupiters: WASP-121b in context (2018, methodology): “We use the opacities described in Freedman et al. (2008), including more recent updates (Freedman et al. 2014), and the molecular abundances described in Sect.”
• Global Climate and Atmospheric Composition of the Ultra-hot Jupiter WASP-103b from HST and Spitzer Phase Curve Observations (2018, background): “The code represents the opacities as correlated-k tables based on the line-by-line opacities described in Visscher et al. (2006); Freedman et al. (2014).”
• H− Opacity and Water Dissociation in the Dayside Atmosphere of the Very Hot Gas Giant WASP-18b (2018, methodology): “We implement the line-by-line cross section database described in Freedman et al. (2008, 2014) with in the correlated-K ”resort-rebin” framework described in Lacis & Oinas (1991); Mollière et al. (2015) and 4 5 Amundsen et al. (2016) at a constant resolving power of 100 between 0.3 and 200 µm.”
• TRANSITIONS IN THE CLOUD COMPOSITION OF HOT JUPITERS (2016, methodology): “We use the opacities described in Freedman et al. (2008), including more recent updates (Freedman et al. 2014), and the molecular abundances described by Lodders & Fegley (2002) and Visscher et al. (2006).”
• Observing the Atmospheres of Known Temperate Earth-sized Planets with JWST (2017, methodology): “The opacity database is based on Freedman et al. (2008) with updates described in Freedman et al. (2014), including methane (Yurchenko & Tennyson 2014) and carbon dioxide (Huang et al. 2013, 2014).”
• THE IMPRINT OF EXOPLANET FORMATION HISTORY ON OBSERVABLE PRESENT-DAY SPECTRA OF HOT JUPITERS (2016, methodology): “However, for the nominal evolution we take the enrichment for the opacity into account in an approximative way by using opacities for a scaled solar-composition gas with [M/H]=0.92 taken from Freedman et al. (2014).”
• On the Cool Side: Modeling the Atmospheres of Brown Dwarfs and Giant Planets (2014, background): “More recently, Freedman et al. (2008, 2014) presented tables of Rosseland and Planck mean opacities appropriate for use in brown dwarf and gas giant thermal structure models.”
• NO THERMAL INVERSION AND A SOLAR WATER ABUNDANCE FOR THE HOT JUPITER HD 209458B FROM HST/WFC3 SPECTROSCOPY (2016, methodology): “We use the absorption cross-section database described in Freedman et al. (2014).”