Born Dry in the Photo-Evaporation Desert: Kepler's Ultra-Short-Period Planets Formed Water-Poor

TL;DR

This paper explains the scarcity of water-rich ultra-short-period planets by modeling atmospheric photo-evaporation, showing most formed water-poor within the snow-line, with implications for understanding their composition and evolution.

Contribution

The study demonstrates that photo-evaporation naturally produces rocky USP planets from sub-Neptunes and argues most USP planets formed water-poor, contrasting with water-rich formation scenarios.

Findings

Most USP planets are likely water-poor due to photo-evaporation.

Water-rich USP planets would be larger than observed, conflicting with the evaporation desert.

The case of 55 Cancri e suggests a water-poor composition.

Abstract

Recent surveys have uncovered an exciting new population of ultra-short-period (USP) planets with orbital periods less than a day. These planets typically have radii <1.5 Earth radii, indicating that they likely have rocky compositions. This stands in contrast to the overall distribution of planets out to ~100 days, which is dominated by low-density sub-Neptunes above 2 Earth radii, which must have gaseous envelopes to explain their size. However, on ultra-short-period orbits, planets are bombarded by intense levels of photo-ionizing radiation and consequently gaseous sub-Neptunes are extremely vulnerable to losing their envelopes to atmospheric photo-evaporation. Using models of planet evolution, I show that the rocky USP planets can easily be produced as the evaporated remnants of sub-Neptunes with H/He envelopes and that we can therefore understand the observed dearth of USP sub-Neptunes as a natural consequence of photo-evaporation. Critically however, planets on USP orbits could often retain their envelopes if they formed with very high-metallicity water dominated envelopes. Such water-rich planets would commonly be >2 Earth radii today, which is inconsistent with the observed evaporation desert, indicating that most USP planets likely formed from water-poor material within the snow-line. Finally, I examine the special case of 55 Cancri e and its possible composition in the light of recent observations, and discuss the prospects for further characterizing this population with future observations.