The effect of evaporation on the evolution of close-in giant planets

By Isabelle Baraffe, F. Selsis, G. Chabrier, Travis S. Barman, F. Allard, Peter Hauschildt, H. Lammer. 2004

191 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We include the effect of evaporation in our evolutionary calculations of close-in giant planets, based on a recent model for thermal evaporation taking into account the XUV flux of the parent star (Lammer et al. 2003). Our analysis leads to the existence of a critical mass for a given orbital distance mcrit(a) below which the evaporation timescale becomes shorter than the thermal timescale of the planet. For planets with initial masses below mcrit, evaporation leads to a rapid expansion of the outer layers and of the total planetary radius, speeding up the evaporation process. Consequently, the planet does not survive as long as estimated by a simple application of mass loss rates without following consistently its evolution. We find out that the transit planet HD 209458b might be in such a dramatic phase, although with an extremely small probability. As a consequence, we predict that, after a certain time, only planets above a value mcrit(a) should be present at an orbital distance a of a star. For planets with initial masses above mcrit, evaporation does not affect the evolution of the radius with time.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/853d2c416c676510c0f47dee78bfb5bf0b2053b8

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

  1. Jon Fortney
  2. J. Owen
  3. D. Charbonneau
  4. N. Madhusudhan
  5. C. Mordasini
  6. Sara Seager
  7. J. Winn
  8. J. Southworth

In Instrumentation

  1. Jon Fortney
  2. J. Owen
  3. D. Charbonneau
  4. J. Southworth
  5. J. Winn
  6. Sara Seager
  7. J. Johnson
  8. N. Madhusudhan

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

  1. J. Owen
  2. Jon Fortney
  3. Sara Seager
  4. C. Mordasini
  5. Yanqin Wu
  6. Sheng Jin
  7. Leslie A. Rogers
  8. D. Charbonneau

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