Detectability of Rocky-Vapour Atmospheres on Super-Earths with Ariel
Yuichi Ito, Quentin Changeat, Billy Edwards, Ahmed Al-Refaie, Giovanna Tinetti, Masahiro Ikoma
Ariel will mark the dawn of a new era as the first large-scale survey characterising exoplanetary atmospheres with science objectives to address fundamental questions about planetary composition, evolution and formation. In this study, we explore the detectability of atmospheres vaporised from magma oceans on dry, rocky Super-Earths orbiting very close to their host stars. The detection of such atmospheres would provide a definitive piece of evidence for rocky planets but are challenging measurements with currently available instruments due to their small spectral signatures. However, some of the hottest planets are believed to have atmospheres composed of vaporised rock, such as Na and SiO, with spectral signatures bright enough to be detected through eclipse observations with planned space-based telescopes. In this study, we find that rocky super-Earths with a irradiation temperature of 3000 K and a distance from Earth of up to 20 pc, as well as planets hotter than 3500 K and closer than 50 pc, have SiO features which are potentially detectable in eclipse spectra observed with Ariel.
Comments: 12 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in Experimental Astronomy, Ariel Special Issue
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:2103.04342 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2103.04342v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Yuichi Ito
[v1] Sun, 7 Mar 2021 12:45:45 UTC (2,775 KB)
