2021-06-30

Mineral Atmosphere of Hot Rocky Exoplanet

speaker: Yuichi Ito

Abstract:

In near future, planed space missions such as JWST and Ariel would open a new era of characterization of close-in rocky exoplanets. Also, about 500 exoplanets whose radii are less than 2 Earth radii have radiative equilibrium temperatures high enough to melt and vaporize rock. Thus, if rocky and dry, they likely have atmospheres composed of rocky materials such as Na and SiO. I call such atmospheres mineral atmospheres. In this talk, I will show the one-dimension theoretical thermal structures and also photo-evaporation efficiency of mineral atmospheres (Ito et al. 2015, 2021, Ito & Ikoma 2021). In addition, I will show that our feasibility assessment demonstrates that secondary transit measurements with planed space telescopes can distinguish mineral atmospheres from volatile-rich atmospheres.