Examining the Interior Structure of Transiting Planets: From Hot
Jupiters to Kepler's Super-Earths
Jonathan Fortney
UC Santa Cruz
Monday April 16th, 4PM, LPL 308
We have now reached the point in studying transiting planets that we can
begin to examine the Jupiter-class planets as a class of astrophysical
objects. At the same time, thanks to Kepler, the number of transiting
planets below 10 Earth masses is now moving beyond just a handful. For
the Jovians, we show that there is an emerging population of planets
that are relatively cool (Teff<1000 K) that appear to be unaffected by
whatever is inflating the radii of the hottest members of this class.
We have searched this cool group for correlations, and we find several
interesting properties regarding the amount of heavy elements within
these planets. For the lowest-mass planets, such as the 6-planet
Kepler-11 system, signs point to an unexpectedly large populations of
mini-Neptunes---low-mass, low-density planets with hydrogen-dominated
envelopes. The Kepler-11 system can already tell us much about the
evaporation of the envelopes of these kinds of planets.
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