1,- 1University of California Santa Cruz, Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, Santa Cruz, CA, USA
- 2Imperial College London, Department of Physics, London, UK
- 3University of California Los Angeles, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Short-period exoplanets are highly irradiated by their host stars’ X-ray and EUV (XUV)
photoionising radiation which heats the upper atmosphere resulting in atmospheric escape.
Because some metals (e.g., C, N, O, Mg, etc.) have larger X-ray photoionisation cross sections
and because X-rays are energetic enough to induce multiple ionisations per photon, it is
necessary to carefully treat the interaction between X-rays and metals. Our model, Wind-AE, is
a relatively fast, open-source 1D hydrodynamic photoionisation relaxation model that takes into
account X-ray and metal physics. Here, we present the findings of several case studies of
metal-rich outflow structure and energetics across planetary mass, radius, flux, and metallicity
space, as well as grids of mass loss rates for high metallicity planets (Z=1,5,10,100). In the high
metallicity regime, as well as in the high XUV flux regime, we find that C, O, Fe, and Ca line
cooling are significant. We also find that mass loss rates decrease more steeply with increasing
metallicity for planets with high escape velocities than for planets with lower escape velocities.
How to cite: Broome, M., Murray-Clay, R., Tang, Y., Owen, J., and McCann, J.: Modeling Atmospheric Escape from Metal-rich Planets with Wind-AE, EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting 2025, Helsinki, Finland, 7–12 Sep 2025, EPSC-DPS2025-1850, https://doi.org/10.5194/epsc-dps2025-1850, 2025.
