"Weather" Variability Of Close-in Extrasolar Giant Planets

Details "Weather" Variability Of Close-in Extrasolar Giant Planets "Weather" Variability Of Close-in Extrasolar Giant Planets

2002-10-22

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0210499v2

Astrophys.J. 587 (2003) L113-L116

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

6 pages, 1 table, 1 figure. Accepted for publication in ApJL

Scientific paper

10.1086/375015

Shallow-water numerical simulations show that the atmospheric circulation of the close-in extrasolar giant planet (EGP) HD 209458b is characterized by moving circumpolar vortices and few bands/jets (in contrast with ~10 bands/jets and absence of polar vortices on cloud-top Jupiter and Saturn). The large spatial scales of moving circulation structures on HD 209458b may generate detectable variability of the planet's atmospheric signatures. In this Letter, we generalize these results to other close-in EGPs, by noting that shallow-water dynamics is essentially specified by the values of the Rossby (Ro) and Burger (Bu) dimensionless numbers. The range of likely values of Ro (~ 0.01 - 10) and Bu (~ 1 - 200) for the atmospheric flow of known close-in EGPs indicates that their circulation should be qualitatively similar to that of HD 209458b. This results mostly from the slow rotation of these tidally-synchronized planets.

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