The Intrinsic Temperature and Radiative–Convective Boundary Depth in the Atmospheres of Hot Jupiters

Thorngren, Daniel; Gao, Peter; Fortney, Jonathan J.

doi:10.3847/2041-8213/ab43d0

Cited by 117 publications

(134 citation statements)

References 63 publications

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“…Thorngren et al (2019) recently predicted a connection between planet equilibrium temperature and their intrinsic flux, suggesting that cold traps on certain hot Jupiters may not exist due to high temperatures in the deep atmosphere. By determining the cloud chemical composition in the nightside of WASP-43b through our JWST/MIRI phase curve observation will provide insights into the presence of a deep cold trap and thus test the predictions from Thorngren et al (2019).…”

Section: Cloud Coveragementioning

confidence: 99%

Global Chemistry and Thermal Structure Models for the Hot Jupiter WASP-43b and Predictions for JWST

Venot

Parmentier

Blecic

et al. 2020

ApJ

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138

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The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is expected to revolutionize the field of exoplanets. The broad wavelength coverage and the high sensitivity of its instruments will allow characterization of exoplanetary atmospheres with unprecedented precision. Following the Call for the Cycle 1 Early Release Science Program, the Transiting Exoplanet Community was awarded time to observe several targets, including WASP-43b. The atmosphere of this hot Jupiter has been intensively observed but still harbors some mysteries, especially concerning the day-night temperature gradient, the efficiency of the atmospheric circulation, and the presence of nightside clouds. We will constrain these properties by observing a full orbit of the planet and extracting its spectroscopic phase curve in the 5-12 µm range with JWST/MIRI. To prepare for these observations, we performed an extensive modeling work with various codes: radiative transfer, chemical kinetics, cloud microphysics, global circulation models, JWST simulators, and spectral retrieval. Our JWST simulations show that we should achieve a precision of 210 ppm per 0.1 µm spectral bin on average, which will allow us to measure the variations of the spectrum in longitude and measure the night-side emission spectrum for the first time. If the atmosphere of WASP-43b is clear, our observations will permit us to determine if its atmosphere has an equilibrium or disequilibrium chemical composition, providing eventually the first conclusive evidence of chemical quenching in a hot Jupiter atmosphere. If the atmosphere is cloudy, a careful retrieval analysis will allow us to identify the cloud composition.

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Section: Cloud Coveragementioning

confidence: 99%

Global Chemistry and Thermal Structure Models for the Hot Jupiter WASP-43b and Predictions for JWST

Venot

Parmentier

Blecic

et al. 2020

ApJ

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138

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“…The observation of a lack of inflated warm Jupiters (Demory & Seager 2011, Laughlin et al 2011, Miller & Fortney 2011, Thorngren & Fortney 2018, Thorngren et al 2019 points toward weak heating rates and/or shallow heat deposition for planets with T eq < 1000 K. Note that it also might point toward a weaker atmospheric circulation because the planet is not tidally locked, as found by previous studies of the atmospheric circulation of warm Jupiters (Showman et al 2015, Rauscher 2017, Ohno & Zhang 2019. To determine the threshold of the combination of heating rate and deposition pressure 10 7 10 8 10 9 10 10 10 11 10 12 10 13 Time [yr] 10 −1 10 0 10 1 10 2 10 3 10 4 10 5 10 6 10 7 Pressure [bars] 10 3 10 4 Temperature [K] 10 3 bars 10 4 bars 10 5 bars 10 6 bars Center Simulations with heating at P dep ≤ 10 5 bars take ∼ 1 Tyr or longer to reach an equilibrium state.…”

Section: Main-sequence Re-inflationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This implies that deep heating mechanisms that weaken in integrated heating rate relative to the incident stellar power at high incident stellar flux may be viable to explain both main-sequence and post-main-sequence reinflation. Thorngren et al (2019) recently showed that the strong heating rates required to explain the radii of hot Jupiters imply that the radiative-convective boundaries of hot Jupiters lie at pressures of 1−100 bars, shallower than the ∼ 1 kbar pressures expected from models without additional heating. Such shallow radiative-convective boundaries are consistent with our findings of main-sequence re-inflation, as we expect that inflated planets will have outer radiative-convective boundaries at ∼ 10 bars.…”

Section: Using Re-inflation To Test Radius Inflation Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reinflation of Warm and Hot Jupiters

Komacek

Thorngren

Lopez

et al. 2020

ApJ

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Understanding the anomalous radii of many transiting hot gas giant planets is a fundamental problem of planetary science. Recent detections of re-inflated warm Jupiters orbiting post-main-sequence stars and the re-inflation of hot Jupiters while their host stars evolve on the main-sequence may help constrain models for the anomalous radii of hot Jupiters. In this work, we present evolution models studying the re-inflation of gas giants to determine how varying the depth and intensity of deposited heating affects both main-sequence re-inflation of hot Jupiters and post-main-sequence re-inflation of warm Jupiters. We find that deeper heating is required to re-inflate hot Jupiters than is needed to suppress their cooling, and that the timescale of re-inflation decreases with increasing heating rate and depth. We find a strong degeneracy between heating rate and depth, with either strong shallow heating or weak deep heating providing an explanation for main-sequence re-inflation of hot Jupiters. This degeneracy between heating rate and depth can be broken in the case of post-main-sequence re-inflation of warm Jupiters, as the inflation must be rapid to occur within post-main-sequence evolution timescales. We also show that the dependence of heating rate on incident stellar flux inferred from the sample of hot Jupiters can explain re-inflation of both warm and hot Jupiters. TESS will obtain a large sample of warm Jupiters orbiting post-main-sequence stars, which will help to constrain the mechanism(s) causing the anomalous radii of gas giant planets.

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“…As the starting point for the adiabatic interior we take the lower intersection of ∇ T,local with ∇ ad . Generally, the boundary moves to lower pressures with increasing T int and T eq [9].…”

Section: Atmosphere-interior Connectionmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…In gaseous planets, the radiative atmosphere transitions smoothly into the adiabatic deep interior. The pressure-temperature (P-T) conditions at this transition influence the internal temperatures and the possible intrinsic heat loss [9]. Higher temperatures at a given pressure level in a fluid planet lead to lower densities and to expansion if not compensated for by an increase in heavy element abundance, an effect that is still relevant for the ice giants Uranus and Neptune [10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Effect of Clouds as an Additional Opacity Source on the Inferred Metallicity of Giant Exoplanets

2019

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Atmospheres regulate the planetary heat loss and therefore influence planetary thermal evolution. Uncertainty in a giant planet's thermal state contributes to the uncertainty in the inferred abundance of heavy elements it contains. Within an analytic atmosphere model, we here investigate the influence that different cloud opacities and cloud depths can have on the metallicity of irradiated extrasolar gas giants, which is inferred from interior models. In this work, the link between inferred metallicity and assumed cloud properties is the thermal profile of atmosphere and interior. Therefore, we perform coupled atmosphere, interior, and evolution calculations. The atmosphere model includes clouds in a much simplified manner; it includes long-wave absorption but neglects shortwave scattering. Within that model, we show that optically thick, high clouds have negligible influence, whereas deep-seated, optically very thick clouds can lead to warmer deep tropospheres and therefore higher bulk heavy element mass estimates. For the young hot Jupiter WASP-10b, we find a possible enhancement in inferred metallicity of up to 10% due to possible silicate clouds at ∼0.3 bar. For WASP-39b, whose observationally derived metallicity is higher than predicted by cloudless models, we find an enhancement by at most 50%. However, further work on cloud properties and their self-consistent coupling to the atmospheric structure is needed in order to reduce uncertainties in the choice of model parameter values, in particular of cloud opacities.

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The Intrinsic Temperature and Radiative–Convective Boundary Depth in the Atmospheres of Hot Jupiters

Cited by 117 publications

References 63 publications

Global Chemistry and Thermal Structure Models for the Hot Jupiter WASP-43b and Predictions for JWST

Global Chemistry and Thermal Structure Models for the Hot Jupiter WASP-43b and Predictions for JWST

Reinflation of Warm and Hot Jupiters

The Effect of Clouds as an Additional Opacity Source on the Inferred Metallicity of Giant Exoplanets

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