We study the orbits, tidal heating and mass loss from satellites around close-in gas giant exoplanets. The focus is on large satellites which are potentially observable by their transit signature. We argue that even Earth-size satellites around hot Jupiters may be immune to destruction by orbital decay; detection of such a massive satellite would strongly constrain theories of tidal dissipation in gas giants, in a manner complementary to orbital circularization. The star's gravity induces significant periodic eccentricity in the satellite's orbit. The resulting tidal heating rates, per unit mass, are far in excess of Io's and dominate radioactive heating out to planet orbital periods of months for reasonable satellite tidal $Q$. Inside planet orbital periods of about a week, tidal heating can completely melt the satellite. Lastly, we compute an upper limit to the satellite mass loss rate due to thermal evaporation from the surface, valid if the satellite's atmosphere is thin and vapor pressure is negligible. Using this upper limit, we find that although rocky satellites around hot Jupiters with orbital periods less than a few days can be significantly evaporated in their lifetimes, detectable satellites suffer negligible mass loss at longer orbital periods.
Aerosols are common in the atmospheres of exoplanets across a wide swath of temperatures, masses, and ages. These aerosols strongly impact observations of transmitted, reflected, and emitted light from exoplanets, obfuscating our understanding of exoplanet thermal structure and composition. Knowing the dominant aerosol composition would facilitate interpretations of exoplanet observations and theoretical understanding of their atmospheres. A variety of compositions have been proposed, including metal oxides and sulphides, iron, chromium, sulphur, and hydrocarbons. However, the relative contrib…
Exoplanets number in their thousands, and the number is ever increasing with the advent of new surveys and improved instrumentation. One of the most surprising things we have learnt from these discoveries is not that small-rocky planets in their stars habitable zones are likely common, but that the most typical size of exoplanet is that not seen in our solar system - radii between that of Neptune and the Earth dubbed mini-Neptunes and super-Earths. In fact, a transiting exoplanet is four times as likely to be in this size regime than that of any giant planet in our solar system. Investigations…
Exoplanetary systems host giant planets on substantially non-circular, close-in orbits. We propose that these eccentricities arise in a phase of giant impacts, analogous to the final stage of Solar System assembly that formed Earth's Moon. In this scenario, the planets scatter each other and collide, with corresponding mass growth as they merge. We numerically integrate an ensemble of systems with varying total planet mass, allowing for collisional growth, to show that (1) the high-eccentricity giants observed today may have formed preferentially in systems of higher initial total planet mass,…
Giant exoplanets located >1 AU away from their parent stars have atmospheric environments cold enough for water and/or ammonia clouds. We have developed a new equilibrium cloud and reflected light spectrum model, ExoREL, for widely separated giant exoplanets. The model includes the dissolution of ammonia in liquid water cloud droplets, an effect studied for the first time for exoplanets. While preserving the causal relationship between temperature and cloud condensation, ExoREL is simple and fast to enable efficient exploration of parameter space. Using the model, we find that the mixing ratio…
The presence of certain elements within a star, and by extension its planet, strongly impacts the formation and evolution of the planetary system. The positive correlation between a host star's iron-content and the presence of an orbiting giant exoplanet has been confirmed; however, the importance of other elements in predicting giant planet occurrence is less certain despite their central role in shaping internal planetary structure. We designed and applied a machine learning algorithm to the Hypatia Catalog (Hinkel et a. 2014) to analyze the stellar abundance patterns of known host stars to …
Photochemical Production of CS2 in Temperate-to-Warm Gas Giant Exoplanet Atmospheres
University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）；Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；University of California, Santa Cruz（加州大学圣克鲁兹分校）；Carnegie Institution for Science（卡内基科学机构）
A Search for Exoplanets around Northern Circumpolar Stars. IV. Six Planet Candidates to the K Giants, HD 44385, HD 97619, HD 106574, HD 118904, HD 164428, and HD 202432
The alkali metal sodium (Na) is one of the most commonly detected chemical species in the upper atmospheres of giant exoplanets. In this work we conducted a homogeneous survey of Na in a diverse sample of ten highly irradiated giant exoplanets using high-resolution transmission spectroscopy. Our sample includes nine planets with previous Na detections and one new detection. We confirm previous detections and assess multiple approaches for deriving Na line properties from high-resolution transmission spectra. The homogeneously measured sodium line depths were used to constrain the atmospheric h…
Aims. We report the detection of long-period radial velocity (RV) variations in three giant stars, HD 19615, HD 150010, and HD 174205, using precise RV measurements. Methods. These detections are part of the Search for Exoplanets around Northern Circumpolar Stars (SENS) survey being conducted at the Bohyunsan Optical Astronomy Observatory (BOAO). The nature of the RV variations was investigated by analyzing the photometric and line shape variations. We found no variability with the RV period in these quantities and conclude that the RV variations are most likely caused by planetary companions.…
Launched on April 2018, NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has been performing a wide-field survey for exoplanets orbiting stars with a goal of producing a rich database for follow-on studies. Here we present estimates of the detected exoplanet orbital periods in the 2-minute cadence mode during the TESS mission. For a two-transit detection criterion, the expected mean value of the most frequently detected orbital period is 5.01 days with the most frequently detected range of 2.12 to 11.82 days in the region with observation of 27 days. Near the poles where the observational d…
High-resolution optical spectroscopy is a powerful tool to characterise exoplanetary atmospheres from the ground. The sodium D lines, with their large cross sections, are especially suited to study the upper layers of atmospheres in this context. We report on the results from HEARTS, a spectroscopic survey of exoplanet atmospheres, performing a comparative study of hot gas giants to determine the effects of stellar irradiation. In this second installation of the series, we highlight the detection of neutral sodium on the ultra-hot giant WASP-76b. We observed three transits of the planet using …
Exomoons represent a crucial missing puzzle piece in our efforts to understand extrasolar planetary systems. To address this deficiency, we here describe an exomoon survey of 70 cool, giant transiting exoplanet candidates found by Kepler. We identify only one which exhibits a moon-like signal that passes a battery of vetting tests: Kepler-1708 b. We show that Kepler-1708 b is a statistically validated Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a Sun-like quiescent star at ~1.6AU. The signal of the exomoon candidate, Kepler-1708 b-i, is a 4.8-sigma effect and is persistent across different instrumental detr…
Despite the severe bias of the transit method of exoplanet discovery toward short orbital periods, a modest sample of transiting exoplanets with orbital periods greater than 100 days is known. Long-term radial velocity (RV) surveys are pivotal to confirming these signals and generating a set of planetary masses and densities for planets receiving moderate to low irradiation from their host stars. Here, we conduct RV observations of Kepler-1514 from the Keck I telescope using the High Resolution Echelle Spectrometer. From these data, we measure the mass of the statistically validated giant ($1.…
We present radio observations made towards the exoplanets Qatar-1b and WASP-80b near 150~MHz with the Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope. These targets are relatively nearby irradiated giant exoplanets, a hot Jupiter and a hot Saturn, with sizes comparable to Jupiter but different masses and lower densities. Both the targets are expected to host extended H/He envelopes like Jupiter, with comparable or larger magnetic moments. No radio emission was detected from these exoplanets, with 3sigma limits of 5.9 and 5.2 mJy for Qatar-1b and WASP-80b, respectively, from these targeted observations. These …
Hydrodynamic simulations of a giant impact to proto-Uranus indicated that such an impact could tilt its rotational axis and produce a circumplanetary debris disk beyond the corotation radius of Uranus. However, whether Uranian satellites can actually be formed from such a wide disk remains unclear. Herein, we modeled a wide debris disk of solids with several initial conditions inferred from the hydrodynamic simulations, and performed $N$-body simulations to investigate in-situ satellite formation from the debris disk. We also took account of orbital evolutions of satellites due to the planetar…
Satellites around substellar companions are a heterogeneous class of objects with a variety of different formation histories. Focusing on potentially detectable satellites around exoplanets and brown dwarfs, we might expect to find objects belonging to two main populations: planet-like satellites similar to Titan or the Galileian Satellites - likely formed within the scope of core accretion; and binary-like objects, formed within different scenarios, such as disk instability. The properties of these potential satellites would be very different from each other. Additionally, we expect that thei…
Context.Recent studies suggest that many giant exoplanets are highly enriched with heavy elements compared to their host star andcontain several tens of Earth masses or more of heavy elements. Such enrichment is considered to have been brought by accretionof planetesimals in late formation stages. Previous dynamical simulations, however, show that planets are unable to collect so muchheavy elements throughin situplanetesimal accretion. Aims.We investigate whether a giant planet migrating inward can capture planetesimals efficiently to significantly increase its metal-licity. Methods.We perform…
The architecture of a planetary system can influence the habitability of a planet via orbital effects, particularly in the areas of stability and eccentricity. Some of these effects are readily apparent, particularly when they occur on short timescales that are easily numerically calculable. However, the appearance and evolution of life can take place on gigayear timescales, long enough that secular effects become important. These effects are difficult to investigate, as a direct integration requires significant computational time. In this paper, we apply a semi-analytic framework in conjuncti…
Most giant exoplanets discovered by radial velocity surveys have much higher eccentricities than those in the solar system. The planet--planet scattering mechanism has been shown to match the broad eccentricity distribution, but the highest-eccentricity planets are often attributed to Kozai-Lidov oscillations induced by a stellar companion. Here we investigate whether the highly eccentric exoplanet population can be produced entirely by scattering. We ran 500 N-body simulations of closely packed giant-planet systems that became unstable under their own mutual perturbations. We find that the su…
