Modelling the Atmospheric Composition of Warm Exoplanets
Olivia Venot, Benjamin Drummond, Yamila Miguel
(Submitted on 22 Nov 2017)
Since the discovery of the first extrasolar planet more than twenty years ago, we have discovered more than three thousand planets orbiting stars other than the Sun. Current observational instruments (on board the Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer, and on ground-based facilities) allowed the scientific community to obtain important information on the physical and chemical properties of these planets. However, for a more in-depth characterisation of these worlds, more powerful telescopes are needed. Thanks to the high sensitivity of their instruments, the next generation of space observatories (e.g. James Webb Space Telescope, ARIEL) will provide observations of unprecedented quality, allowing us to extract far more information than what was previously possible. Such high quality observations will provide constraints on theoretical models of exoplanet atmospheres and lead to a greater understanding of the physics and chemistry. Important modelling efforts have been carried out during the past few years, showing that numerous parameters and processes (such as the element abundances, temperature, mixing, etc.) are likely to effect the atmospheric composition of exoplanets and subsequently the observable spectra. In this manuscript, we review the different parameters that can influence the molecular composition of exoplanet atmospheres. We also consider future developments that are necessary to improve atmospheric models, driven by the need to interpret the available observations and show how ARIEL is going to improve our view and characterisation of exoplanet atmospheres.
Comments: Submitted to Experimental Astronomy, ARIEL Special Issue
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:1711.08433 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:1711.08433v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Olivia Venot
[v1] Wed, 22 Nov 2017 18:29:57 GMT (5167kb,D)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.08433
