Model bond albedos of extrasolar giant planets

Atmospheres of Extrasolar Giant Planets

The key to understanding an extrasolar giant planet’s spectrum–and hence its detectability and evolution–lies with its atmosphere. Now that direct observations of thermal emission from extrasolar giant planets are in hand, atmosphere models can be used to constrain atmospheric composition, thermal structure, and ultimately the formation and evolution of detected planets. We review the important...

Falling Transiting Extrasolar Giant Planets

We revisit the tidal stability of extrasolar systems harboring a transiting planet and demonstrate that, independently of any tidal model, none but one (HAT-P-2b) of these planets has a tidal equilibrium state, which implies ultimately a collision of these objects with their host star. Consequently, conventional circularization and synchronization timescales cannot be defined because the corres...

A Theory of Extrasolar Giant Planets

We present a broad suite of models of extrasolar giant planets (EGP's), ranging in mass from 0.3 to 15 Jupiter masses. The models predict luminosity (both re ected and emitted) as a function of age, mass, deuterium abundance and distance from parent stars of various spectral type. We also explore the e ects of helium mass fraction, rotation rate and the presence of a rock-ice core. The models i...

The composition of transiting giant extrasolar planets

In principle, the combined measurements of the mass and radius a giant exoplanet allow one to determine the relative fraction of hydrogen and helium and of heavy elements in the planet. However, uncertainties on the underlying physics imply that some known transiting planets appear anomalously large, and this generally prevent any firm conclusion when a planet is considered on an individual bas...

Theoretical Models of Extrasolar Giant Planets ∗