Ozone-like layer in an exoplanet atmosphere

Exoplanet atmosphere. Thermal structure of an exoplanet atmosphere from phase-resolved emission spectroscopy.

Exoplanets that orbit close to their host stars are much more highly irradiated than their solar system counterparts. Understanding the thermal structures and appearances of these planets requires investigating how their atmospheres respond to such extreme stellar forcing. We present spectroscopic thermal emission measurements as a function of orbital phase ("phase-curve observations") for the ...

Exoplanet Hd209458b: Inflated Hydrogen Atmosphere but No Sign of Evaporation

Many extrasolar planets orbit closely to their parent star. Their existence raises the fundamental problem of loss and gain in their mass. For exoplanet HD209458b, reports on an unusually extended hydrogen corona and a hot layer in the lower atmosphere seem to support the scenario of atmospheric inflation by the strong stellar irradiation. However, difficulties in reconciling evaporation models...

Direct Measure of Radiative and Dynamical Properties of an Exoplanet Atmosphere

Two decades after the discovery of 51Pegb, the formation processes and atmospheres of short-period gas giants remain poorly understood. Observations of eccentric systems provide key insights on those topics as they can illuminate how a planet’s atmosphere responds to changes in incident flux. We report here the analysis of multi-day multi-channel photometry of the eccentric (e 0.93 ~ ) hot Ju...

Ozone Layer Depletion

New Directions: Stratospheric ozone recovery in a changing atmosphere

About 90% of the ozone in the Earth’s atmosphere resides in the stratosphere, forming the ‘‘ozone layer’’ which shields life on Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation. In the mid-1970s, it was recognized that anthropogenic chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) could deplete the ozone layer. Observations of the ozone layer indicated that depletion was occurring due to the buildup of CFCs and Halons in th...