Atmospheric Escape from Hot Jupiters
Ruth Murray-Clay (UC Berkeley, CfA), Eugene Chiang (UC Berkeley),, Norman Murray (CITA)

TL;DR
This paper models atmospheric escape from hot Jupiters driven by UV radiation, showing that mass loss occurs as a hydrodynamic wind with limited impact on planetary mass but potential observable signatures.
Contribution
It introduces a comprehensive model of hot Jupiter atmospheric escape including realistic heating, cooling, and stellar wind effects, highlighting the conditions under which winds are suppressed or active.
Findings
Mass loss rates are up to 2 x 10^12 g/s during pre-main-sequence phase.
Mass loss rates are around 2 x 10^10 g/s during main sequence.
UV-driven winds produce observable signatures like Lyman-alpha absorption.
Abstract
Photoionization heating from UV radiation incident on the atmospheres of hot Jupiters may drive planetary mass loss. We construct a model of escape that includes realistic heating and cooling, ionization balance, tidal gravity, and pressure confinement by the host star wind. We show that mass loss takes the form of a hydrodynamic ("Parker") wind, emitted from the planet's dayside during lulls in the stellar wind. When dayside winds are suppressed by the confining action of the stellar wind, nightside winds might pick up if there is sufficient horizontal transport of heat. A hot Jupiter loses mass at maximum rates of ~2 x 10^12 g/s during its host star's pre-main-sequence phase and ~2 x10^10 g/s during the star's main sequence lifetime, for total maximum losses of ~0.06% and ~0.6% of the planet's mass, respectively. For UV fluxes F_UV < 10^4 erg/cm^2/s, the mass loss rate is…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
