TY - JOUR
T1 - Identifying Inflated Super-Earths and Photo-evaporated Cores
AU - Carrera, Daniel
AU - Ford, Eric B.
AU - Izidoro, Andre
AU - Jontof-Hutter, Daniel
AU - Raymond, Sean N.
AU - Wolfgang, Angie
N1 - Funding Information:
E.B.F. acknowledges support from NASA Exoplanet Research Program award NNX15AE21G. The results reported herein benefited from collaborations and/or information exchange within NASA’s Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS) research coordination network sponsored by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. The Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds is supported by the Pennsylvania State University, the Eberly College of Science, and the Pennsylvania Space Grant Consortium. We gratefully acknowledge support from NSF grant MRI-1626251. This research or portions of this research were conducted with Advanced CyberInfrastructure computational resources provided by The Institute for CyberScience at the Pennsylvania State University (http://ics.psu.edu), including the CyberLAMP cluster supported by NSF grant MRI-1626251. A.I. thanks financial support from FAPESP via proc. 16/19556-7 and 16/12686-2.
Funding Information:
D.C. acknowledges Hilke Schlichting, Eric Lopez, and Jonathan Fortney for discussions on modeling super-Earth atmospheres. D.C.ʼs research was supported by an appointment to the NASA Postdoctoral Program within NASA’s Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS), administered by Universities Space Research Association under contract with NASA. This work benefited from the 2018 Exoplanet Summer Program in the Other Worlds Laboratory (OWL) at the University of California, Santa Cruz, a program funded by the Heising-Simons Foundation.
Funding Information:
S.N.R. thanks the Agence Nationale pour la Recherche via grant ANR-13-BS05-0003-002 (grant MOJO) and NASA Astrobiology Institute’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory Lead Team, funded under solicitation NNH12ZDA002C and cooperative agreement No. NNA13AA93A.
Funding Information:
A.I. thanks financial support from FAPESP via proc. 16/ 19556-7 and 16/12686-2.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved..
PY - 2018/10/20
Y1 - 2018/10/20
N2 - We present empirical evidence, supported by a planet formation model, to show that the curve approximates the location of the so-called photo-evaporation valley. Planets below that curve are likely to have experienced complete photo-evaporation, and planets just above it appear to have inflated radii; thus we identify a new population of inflated super-Earths and mini-Neptunes. Our N-body simulations are set within an evolving protoplanetary disk and include prescriptions for orbital migration, gas accretion, and atmospheric loss due to giant impacts. Our simulated systems broadly match the sizes and periods of super-Earths in the Kepler catalog. They also reproduce the relative sizes of adjacent planets in the same system, with the exception of planet pairs that straddle the photo-evaporation valley. This latter group is populated by planet pairs with either very large or very small size ratios (R out/R in ≫ 1 or R out/R in ≪ 1) and a dearth of size ratios near unity. It appears that this feature could be reproduced if the planet outside the photo-evaporation valley (typically the outer planet, but sometimes not) has its atmosphere significantly expanded by stellar irradiation. This new population of planets may be ideal targets for future transit spectroscopy observations with the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope.
AB - We present empirical evidence, supported by a planet formation model, to show that the curve approximates the location of the so-called photo-evaporation valley. Planets below that curve are likely to have experienced complete photo-evaporation, and planets just above it appear to have inflated radii; thus we identify a new population of inflated super-Earths and mini-Neptunes. Our N-body simulations are set within an evolving protoplanetary disk and include prescriptions for orbital migration, gas accretion, and atmospheric loss due to giant impacts. Our simulated systems broadly match the sizes and periods of super-Earths in the Kepler catalog. They also reproduce the relative sizes of adjacent planets in the same system, with the exception of planet pairs that straddle the photo-evaporation valley. This latter group is populated by planet pairs with either very large or very small size ratios (R out/R in ≫ 1 or R out/R in ≪ 1) and a dearth of size ratios near unity. It appears that this feature could be reproduced if the planet outside the photo-evaporation valley (typically the outer planet, but sometimes not) has its atmosphere significantly expanded by stellar irradiation. This new population of planets may be ideal targets for future transit spectroscopy observations with the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope.
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U2 - 10.3847/1538-4357/aadf8a
DO - 10.3847/1538-4357/aadf8a
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85055346810
SN - 0004-637X
VL - 866
JO - Astrophysical Journal
JF - Astrophysical Journal
IS - 2
M1 - 104
ER -