Netherlands Research School for Astronomy (NOVA) | 2020 Aug 05
The thermal structure of hot gas giant exoplanet atmospheres is likely to be inverted for the hottest planets, a class of planets known as ultra-hot Jupiters. ...
They were searching for statistical signatures of elusive inverted atmospheres with data from the late Spitzer Space Telescope. They found that planets above 1700 Kelvin (around 1400℃) displayed different emission properties than their cooler counterparts, indicating temperature inversions in the hottest planets and supporting previous theoretical predictions. ...
Hot Jupiters are gaseous giant planets with very large atmospheres. They are similar to the mass of Jupiter yet are much hotter due to them orbiting much closer to their host stars. The temperature of a planet's atmosphere changes with altitude. The switch between decreasing temperature and increasing temperature with increasing altitude is called a temperature inversion. Theoretical predictions of hot Jupiter atmospheres suggest that temperature inversions should occur in planets of around 1800K; above this temperature is the regime of the ultra-hot Jupiters in which all molecular species are in the gas phase. ...
A Transition Between the Hot and the Ultra-hot Jupiter Atmospheres ~ Claire Baxter et al
- Astronomy & Astrophysics 639:A36 (Jul 2020) DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201937394
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:2007.15287 > 30 Jul 2020