Weather on Substellar Worlds: Mapping the Atmospheres of Cool Brown Dwarfs

Details Weather on Substellar Worlds: Mapping the Atmospheres of Cool Brown Dwarfs Weather on Substellar Worlds: Mapping the Atmospheres of Cool Brown Dwarfs

May 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011sptz.prop80213r&link_type=abstract

Spitzer Proposal ID #80213

Physics

Scientific paper

While Spitzer has already contributed significantly to the study of winds and weather on highly irradiated extrasolar planets, the atmospheres of free-floating brown dwarfs probe weather in an entirely different physical regime, where global atmospheric flows arise primarily from a combination of rapid rotation and internal convection, without external forcing. We propose to use Warm Spitzer to monitor evolving weather patterns for a subset of brown dwarfs displaying large-amplitude, quasi-periodic variability, indicative of discrete and heterogeneous cloud features in their atmospheres. We plan to obtain continuous light curves for our targets spanning several consecutive rotations in order to map the evolution of cloud features over time and obtain an empirical characterization of their atmospheric dynamics, including: the spatial frequencies and timescales of cloud features, evidence for differential rotation and wind speeds, and the dependence of weather patterns on rotation period. In turn, the data can be used to inform atmospheric circulation models in a mass/rotation regime never before probed, potentially shedding light on competing circulation models for Solar System gas giant planets.

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