2018/05/18 by Thaddeus D. Komacek, Xianyu Tan, Komacek, Thaddeus D. +1
Physics and Astronomy · #Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics (physics.ao-ph) #Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP) #FOS: Physical sciences #astro-ph.EP #physics.ao-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1805.07415
Accepted at Research Notes of the AAS
arxiv created 2018/05/18 · arxiv updated 2018/05/22
Secondary eclipse observations of ultra-hot Jupiters have found evidence that hydrogen is dissociated on their daysides. Additionally, full-phase light curve observations of ultra-hot Jupiters show a smaller day-night emitted flux contrast than that expected from previous theory. Recently, it was proposed by Bell & Cowan (2018) that the heat intake to dissociate hydrogen and heat release due to recombination of dissociated hydrogen can affect the atmospheric circulation of ultra-hot Jupiters. In this work, we add cooling/heating due to dissociation/recombination into the analytic theory of Komacek & Showman (2016) and Zhang & Showman (2017) for the dayside-nightside temperature contrasts of hot Jupiters. We find that at high values of incident stellar flux, the day-night temperature contrast of ultra-hot Jupiters may decrease with increasing incident stellar flux due to dissociation/recombination, the opposite of that expected without including the effects of dissociation/recombination. We propose that a combination of a greater number of full-phase light curve observations of ultra-hot Jupiters and future General Circulation Models that include the effects of dissociation/recombination could determine in detail how the atmospheric circulation of ultra-hot Jupiters differs from that of cooler planets.