Europlanet Science Congress 2020
Virtual meeting
21 September – 9 October 2020
Europlanet Science Congress 2020
Virtual meeting
21 September – 9 October 2020
EPSC Abstracts
Vol.14, EPSC2020-718, 2020
https://doi.org/10.5194/epsc2020-718
Europlanet Science Congress 2020
© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Photoevaporation of Water Dominated Exoplanet Atmospheres

Laura Harbach1, James Owen2, and Subhanjoy Mohanty3
Laura Harbach et al.
  • 1Imperial College London, Astrophysics, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (lmh19@ic.ac.uk)
  • 2Imperial College London, Astrophysics, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (james.owen@imperial.ac.uk)
  • 3Imperial College London, Astrophysics, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (s.mohanty@imperial.ac.uk)

The atmospheres of close-in, low-mass exoplanets are extremely vulnerable to the effects of stellar UV to X-ray radiation. Photoevaporation can significantly ablate planetary atmospheres or even strip them entirely, potentially rendering a planet inhabitable. Existing hydrodynamical studies of this important atmospheric mass loss mechanism have mainly considered hydrogen/helium dominated atmospheres. Currently, the effect of more complex chemistry on photoevaporative mass loss has only been the subject of a limited number of studies (e.g. Bolmont et al. 2017). In the era of more advanced exoplanet atmospheric observations, it is more important than ever to determine what, if any atmosphere, these planets may have been able to retain. Here, I present preliminary results of hydrodynamic simulations, showing how the atmosphere of a low-mass planet undergoing photoevaporation is affected by the inclusion of water.

How to cite: Harbach, L., Owen, J., and Mohanty, S.: Photoevaporation of Water Dominated Exoplanet Atmospheres, Europlanet Science Congress 2020, online, 21 September–9 Oct 2020, EPSC2020-718, https://doi.org/10.5194/epsc2020-718, 2020