Analytic Modeling of Tidally Locked Rocky Planet Atmospheres Across Dynamical Regimes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new analytic model for tidally locked rocky planet atmospheres that accounts for diverse dynamical regimes, improving interpretation of JWST observations and revealing significant variability in temperature structures.

Contribution

A novel four-box analytic model that relaxes the weak temperature gradient assumption, enabling more accurate interpretation of exoplanet atmospheres across different dynamical regimes.

Findings

Over 40% of observed terrestrial planets may violate weak temperature gradient assumptions.

Nightside temperature can vary by hundreds of Kelvin depending on atmospheric circulation.

Assumptions about atmospheric dynamics can bias atmospheric property estimates by an order of magnitude.

Abstract

We present a new first-principles analytic approach to interpreting eclipses and phase curves of rocky planets. Observations with JWST have reported nondetections of atmospheres around the majority of hot rocky planets orbiting M dwarfs. However, most of these "bare rock" inferences are based on models that are ill-suited to many currently observable planets, as they were developed for use on cooler, slower-rotating bodies. In particular, these models rely on the weak temperature gradient assumption, in which rotation is neglected and temperature gradients can be simply related to wind speeds. We find that this assumption may not be valid for over 40% of terrestrials observed with JWST, including TRAPPIST-1b, GJ 367b, and TOI-2445b. Our simple new four-box model does not rely on this assumption, and instead allows the heat transport efficiency to be specified or follow scalings derived herein. This method is fast, interpretable, physically motivated, reproduces previous general circulation model results, and can be used as a starting point for more detailed modeling. We observe that the longitudinal temperature structure of tidally locked terrestrials depends strongly on the atmospheric circulation. Considering the applicable range of atmospheric dynamical regimes, we find that a given planet's nightside temperature can plausibly vary by 100s of Kelvin (from detectable to undetectable). Furthermore, a planet's dayside energy balance can display complex behavior, with degeneracies between surface pressure and dayside temperature. Illustrating an application to observations, we find that assumptions about atmospheric dynamics and longitudinal temperature structure can bias atmospheric constraints at the order-of-magnitude level.