Search results for "EXOPLANETS"
showing 8 items of 8 documents
Diving into exoplanets: Are water seas the most common?
2019
One of the basic tenets of exobiology is the need for a liquid substratum in which life can arise, evolve, and develop. The most common version of this idea involves the necessity of water to act as such a substratum, both because that is the case on Earth and because it seems to be the most viable liquid for chemical reactions that lead to life. Other liquid media that could harbor life, however, have occasionally been put forth. In this work, we investigate the relative probability of finding superficial seas on rocky worlds that could be composed of nine different, potentially abundant, liquids, including water. We study the phase space size of habitable zones defined for those substance…
Could CoRoT-7b and Kepler-10b be remnants of evaporated gas or ice giants?
2009
We present thermal mass loss calculations over evolutionary time scales for the investigation if the smallest transiting rocky exoplanets CoRoT-7b (∼1.68REarth) and Kepler-10b (∼1.416REarth) could be remnants of an initially more massive hydrogen-rich gas giant or a hot Neptune-class exoplanet. We apply a thermal mass loss formula which yields results that are comparable to hydrodynamic loss models. Our approach considers the effect of the Roche lobe, realistic heating efficiencies and a radius scaling law derived from observations of hot Jupiters. We study the influence of the mean planetary density on the thermal mass loss by placing hypothetical exoplanets with the characteristics of Jup…
ARES. III. Unveiling the Two Faces of KELT-7 b with HST WFC3
2020
We present the analysis of the hot-Jupiter KELT-7b using transmission and emission spectroscopy from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), both taken with the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). Our study uncovers a rich transmission spectrum which is consistent with a cloud-free atmosphere and suggests the presence of H2O and H-. In contrast, the extracted emission spectrum does not contain strong absorption features and, although it is not consistent with a simple blackbody, it can be explained by a varying temperature-pressure profile, collision induced absorption (CIA) and H-. KELT-7 b had also been studied with other space-based instruments and we explore the effects of introducing these additiona…
Development of processes, qualification, and de-risking for the Ariel primary mirror
2022
The work carried out in the Ph.D. program focused on developing the optics design of the Atmospheric Remote-Sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large Survey (Ariel) telescope, an optical/infrared mission of the European Space Agency (ESA), whose primary mirror is an off-axis paraboloid mirror measuring 1.2 · 0.7m. The novelty of the telescope is that both the mirrors and the telescope structure will be made of aluminium, and the primary mirror will be made of bare aluminium without a thick hard coating. The choice is mainly due to the thermo-mechanical properties of the material, and the usage of the same material for the whole structure will allow better heat exchange between the mirror and the opt…
Abundance signature of M dwarf stars
2020
Most of our current knowledge on planet formation is still based on the analysis of main-sequence, solar-type stars. Conversely, detailed chemical studies of large samples of M-dwarf planet hosts are still missing. We aim to test whether the correlations between the metallicity, individual chemical abundances, and mass of the star and the presence of different type of planets found for FGK stars still holds for the less massive M dwarf stars. Methods to determine in a consistent way stellar abundances of M dwarfs from high-resolution optical spectra are still missing. The present work is a first attempt to fill this gap. We analyse in a coherent and homogeneous way a large sample of M dwarf…
Methane line parameters in the HITRAN2012 database
2013
International audience; The compilation of methane molecular line parameters was updated to include new global analyses and measurements for 12CH4, 13CH4 and 12CH3D. Over 70% of the methane parameters in HITRAN2008 were replaced; existing parameters retained were the microwave lines and the Dyad of 13CH4 near 7 μm and ν6 of 13CH3D near 8.7 μm, 12CH3D (7-4076 cm-1), hot bands of 12CH4 (1887-3370 cm-1) and normal sample CH4 (4800-5550 cm-1 and 8000-9200 cm-1). With a minimum intensity at 296 K in units of cm-1/(molecule cm-2) set to 10-37 for the far-IR and 10-29 for the mid- and near-IR, the methane database increased from 290,091 lines in HITRAN2008 to 468,013 lines, and three-fourths of th…
The TESS Grand Unified Hot Jupiter Survey I. 10 planets
2022
Hot Jupiters-short-period giant planets-were the first extrasolar planets to be discovered, but many questions about their origin remain. NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an all-sky search for transiting planets, presents an opportunity to address these questions by constructing a uniform sample of hot Jupiters for demographic study through new detections and unifying the work of previous ground-based transit surveys. As the first results of an effort to build this large sample of planets, we report here the discovery of 10 new hot Jupiters (TOI-2193Ab, TOI-2207b, TOI-2236b, TOI-2421b, TOI-2567b, TOI-2570b, TOI-3331b, TOI-3540Ab, TOI-3693b, TOI-4137b). All of the planets…
KELT-9b radial velocity curve
2019
In the framework of the GAPS project, we observed the planet-hosting star KELT-9 (A-type star, vsini~110km/s) with the HARPS-N spectrograph at the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo. In this work we analyse the spectra and the extracted radial velocities, to constrain the physical parameters of the system and to detect the planetary atmosphere of KELT-9b. We extracted from the high-resolution optical spectra the mean stellar line profiles with an analysis based on the Least Square Deconvolution technique. Then, we computed the stellar radial velocities with a method optimized for fast rotators, by fitting the mean stellar line profile with a purely rotational profile instead of using a Gaussian f…