2018/01/03 by B. Drummond, Benjamin Drummond, N. J. Mayne +12 · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Atmospheric radiative transfer codes #Exoplanet #Metallicity #Opacity #Radiative transfer #Stellar atmosphere #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #Thermal #Thermal equilibrium #Thermodynamic equilibrium #astro-ph.EP
paper · pdf · doi:10.1051/0004-6361/201732010
Accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics
arxiv created 2018/01/03 · openalex publication_date 2018/01/05 · openalex created_date 2018/01/12 · arxiv updated 2018/05/16 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
In this work, we have performed a series of simulations of the atmosphere of GJ 1214b assuming different metallicities using the Met Office Unified Model (UM). The UM is a general circulation model (GCM) that solves the deep, non-hydrostatic equations of motion and uses a flexible and accurate radiative transfer scheme, based on the two-stream and correlated- k approximations, to calculate the heating rates. In this work we consistently couple a well-tested Gibbs energy minimisation scheme to solve for the chemical equilibrium abundances locally in each grid cell for a general set of elemental abundances, further improving the flexibility and accuracy of the model. As the metallicity of the atmosphere is increased we find significant changes in the dynamical and thermal structure, with subsequent implications for the simulated phase curve. The trends that we find are qualitatively consistent with previous works, though with quantitative differences. We investigate in detail the effect of increasing the metallicity by splitting the mechanism into constituents, involving the mean molecular weight, the heat capacity and the opacities. We find the opacity effect to be the dominant mechanism in altering the circulation and thermal structure. This result highlights the importance of accurately computing the opacities and radiative transfer in 3D GCMs.