Exoplanet Atmospheres: Physical Processes

By Sara Seager, D. Deming. 2010

417 citations recorded by the source corpus.

At the dawn of the first discovery of exoplanets orbiting sun-like stars in the mid-1990s, few believed that observations of exoplanet atmospheres would ever be possible. After the 2002 Hubble Space Telescope detection of a transiting exoplanet atmosphere, many skeptics discounted it as a one-object, one-method success. Nevertheless, the field is now firmly established, with over two dozen exoplanet atmospheres observed today. Hot Jupiters are the type of exoplanet currently most amenable to study. Highlights include: detection of molecular spectral features; observation of day-night temperature gradients; and constraints on vertical atmospheric structure. Atmospheres of giant planets far from their host stars are also being studied with direct imaging. The ultimate exoplanet goal is to answer the enigmatic and ancient question, "Are we alone?" via detection of atmospheric biosignatures. Two exciting prospects are the immediate focus on transiting super Earths orbiting in the habitable zone of M-dwarfs, and ultimately the spaceborne direct imaging of true Earth analogs.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a4162c599ae677ea9730b8c62e9652cb6f46abb7

How researchers see this paper

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. N. Madhusudhan
2. Jon Fortney
3. A. Showman
4. D. Deming
5. Sara Seager
6. H. Knutson
7. M. Line
8. D. Sing

Citations in the corpus

• CHARACTERIZING TRANSITING EXOPLANET ATMOSPHERES WITH JWST (2015, background): “…atmospheres of a diversity of planets is critical to understanding their bulk compositions, formation (and any migration), energy balance, and atmospheric processes (e.g., see Crossfield 2015; Madhusudhan et al. 2014; Burrows & Orton 2010; Heng & Showman 2015; Seager & Deming 2010; Burrows 2014).”
• A FRAMEWORK FOR CHARACTERIZING THE ATMOSPHERES OF LOW-MASS LOW-DENSITY TRANSITING PLANETS (2013, background): “…the first observations of light transmitted (Charbonneau et al. 2002) and emitted (Charbonneau et al. 2005; Deming et al. 2005) by hot Jupiters, the realm of exoplanet characterization has expanded into a larger sample size of hot Jupiters (Seager & Deming 2010) as well as into smaller planets.”
• LYα TRANSIT SPECTROSCOPY AND THE NEUTRAL HYDROGEN TAIL OF THE HOT NEPTUNE GJ 436b (2014, background): “Many of these planets called “hot Jupiters” are massive (& 50 M⊕ & 0.15 MJup), orbit very close to their host stars (≤ 0.05 AU), and have orbital periods of only a few days (Seager & Deming 2010).”
• WASP-121 b: a hot Jupiter close to tidal disruption transiting an active F star (2015, background): “Furthermore, these planets being highly irradiated due to their proximity to their host stars, they are also generally favorable targets for atmospheric studies via secondary eclipse observations (see e.g. Seager & Deming 2010, Anderson et al. 2013, Gillon et al. 2010).”
• Is Proxima Centauri b Habitable? A Study of Atmospheric Loss (2017, background): “…is significant because Proxima Centauri is the nearest star to the Earth, and plans are already underway for exploring PCb.1 Exoplanetary atmospheres are an important area of research since spectroscopic analyses can potentially reveal the presence of life via biosignatures (Seager & Deming 2010).”
• ABIOTIC OZONE AND OXYGEN IN ATMOSPHERES SIMILAR TO PREBIOTIC EARTH (2014, background): “However, the most likely atmospheric composition for rocky habitable planets is CO2, H2 and N2 (e.g. Zahnle et al., 2010; Seager and Deming, 2010).”
• Atmospheric circulation of tidally locked exoplanets: a suite of benchmark tests for dynamical solvers (2010, background): “1 IN T RO D U C T I O N The nascent field of extrasolar planets is rapidly expanding, as evidenced by the flood of discoveries made in the past decade alone (e.g. Udry & Santos 2007; Seager & Deming 2010).”
• MODULES FOR EXPERIMENTS IN STELLAR ASTROPHYSICS (MESA): PLANETS, OSCILLATIONS, ROTATION, AND MASSIVE STARS (2013, background): “…in our solar system and in the studies of the plethora of these newly discovered exoplanets, including the characteristics of the planet-hosting stars and the interiors, atmospheres, surface gravities, temperatures, and compositions of the planets (e.g., Udry & Santos 2007; Seager & Deming 2010).”
• KELT-1b: A STRONGLY IRRADIATED, HIGHLY INFLATED, SHORT PERIOD, 27 JUPITER-MASS COMPANION TRANSITING A MID-F STAR (2012, methodology): “Following Seager (2010), we parametrized the heat redistribution efficiency as f ′ , which is 1/4 in the case of uniform redistribution, and 2/3 in the case of no redistribution.”
• HOW TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN CLOUDY MINI-NEPTUNES AND WATER/VOLATILE-DOMINATED SUPER-EARTHS (2013, background): “The weak scaling illustrates the great potential of transmission spectroscopy to characterize temperate and small exoplanets (Deming et al. 2009; Seager & Deming 2010).”
• How to Characterize Habitable Worlds and Signs of Life (2017, background): “…the field of exoplanet research has transitioned from the detection of exoplanets to characterization of extrasolar giant planets (EGPs; see, e.g., Seager & Deming 2010, Burrows 2014, Crossfield 2015) as well as the discovery of dozens of small exoplanets, which could potentially be habitable…”
• C/O RATIO AS A DIMENSION FOR CHARACTERIZING EXOPLANETARY ATMOSPHERES (2012, background): “Observations of thermal emission have been reported for over two dozen transiting exoplanets (Seager & Deming 2010), and have been used to constrain atmospheric temperature profiles (Burrows et al. 2007, Knutson et al. 2008, Madhusudhan & Seager 2009,2010, Christiansen et al. 2010) and chemical…”
• Mathematical and physical ideas for climate science (2013, background): “The discovery of hundreds of planets outside the solar system (exoplanets) (Seager and Deming , 2010) is extending the scope of planetary sciences towards the study of the so-called exoclimates (Heng , 2012a).”
• The Complete Transmission Spectrum of WASP-39b with a Precise Water Constraint (2017, background): “Exoplanets have greatly advanced our understanding of planetary systems, expanding theory and observations beyond our solar system (e.g. Seager & Deming 2010; Fortney et al. 2010; Marley et al. 2013; Deming et al. 2013; Stevenson et al. 2014; Sing et al. 2016; Kataria et al. 2016; Evans et al.…”
• Optimal estimation retrievals of the atmospheric structure and composition of HD 189733b from secondary eclipse spectroscopy (2011, background): “However, the accuracy of transit spectros opy and photometry has been called into question (see the reviewby Seager & Deming 2010), and most recently Gibson et al. (2011) claimed that instrumental systematics limit our ability toconstrain atmospheric CH4 from theseHST /NICMOS data as well as CO2…”
• Detection of a transit of the super-Earth 55 Cancri e with warm Spitzer (2011, background): “Assuming a null albedo and a heat distribution factor f ′ = 1/4 (Seager 2010).”