Atmospheric heat redistribution and collapse on tidally locked rocky planets

TL;DR

This study models heat transport and atmospheric stability on tidally locked rocky exoplanets, providing new formulas for collapse pressure and insights into atmospheric collapse conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical framework and empirical formulas for atmospheric collapse pressure, improving understanding of heat redistribution on tidally locked exoplanets.

Findings

Boundary layer dominates energy balance over large-scale circulation.

Derived expressions match GCM results without tuning.

Collapse pressure for CO2 atmospheres is about five times higher than previous estimates.

Abstract

Atmospheric collapse is likely to be of fundamental importance to tidally locked rocky exoplanets but remains understudied. Here, general results on the heat transport and stability of tidally locked terrestrial-type atmospheres are reported. First, the problem is modeled with an idealized 3D general circulation model (GCM) with gray gas radiative transfer. It is shown that over a wide range of parameters the atmospheric boundary layer, rather than the large-scale circulation, is the key to understanding the planetary energy balance. Through a scaling analysis of the interhemispheric energy transfer, theoretical expressions for the day-night temperature difference and surface wind speed are created that reproduce the GCM results without tuning. Next, the GCM is used with correlated-k radiative transfer to study heat transport for two real gases (CO2 and CO). For CO2, empirical formulae for the collapse pressure as a function of planetary mass and stellar flux are produced, and critical pressures for atmospheric collapse at Earth's stellar flux are obtained that are around five times higher (0.14 bar) than previous gray gas estimates. These results provide constraints on atmospheric stability that will aid in future interpretation of observations and exoplanet habitability modeling.