Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Oct 2010
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010dps....42.4701f&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #42, #47.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.1052
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
1
Scientific paper
Forty years ago the first work on understanding the composition, infrared spectra, and temperature structure of the atmospheres of the solar system's giant planets was just getting underway. Now we are doing similar 1st-order reconnaissance and modeling to understand the atmospheres of exoplanets, whose categories include Jupiter-class, Neptune-class, and un-classifiable planets. One driving force behind this work is that as the data gathered becomes better, the prospect exists to understand the atmospheres of the solar system's planets in the context of similar exoplanets. Over the past few years, planets that transit their parent stars, predominantly in short-period orbits, have allowed us the best access to information about exoplanetary atmospheres. Mostly thanks to the Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes, we have now been able to begin the first reconnaissance of these hot planets, some of which orbit their parent stars in less than one day. We have made initial attempts to classify the atmospheres of the Jupiter-class transiting planets in terms of the presence or absence of temperature inversions, but finding a satisfactory theory to explain the observations has been a challenge. The atmospheric characterization of "super Earth" atmospheres such as GJ 1214b is now underway, showing us a clear pathway towards characterizing even smaller planets.
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