Modeling the internal composition and evolution of warm Jupiters with MESA

Giant planets (Mp > 0.3 Mjup) with orbital periods between ~10-200 days (a.k.a warm-Jupiters), are excellent targets to measure their bulk composition, to characterize their atmospheric abundances and to study their formation and evolution mechanisms. In particular, they are less affected by the strong stellar irradiation and tidal interactions with the host star, that their innermost siblings, the so-called hot-Jupiters, suffer.

In this talk I will first describe our MESA (Paxton et al. 2011) based interior/evolutionary models
of gas giants, which include a rocky-icy core, sorrounded by a H/He gaseous envelope, and with metals homogeneously mixed in the envelope. In addition, our models include the effect of the stellar irradiation in the cooling evolution of the planet. For this, we also include the host star evolution in our models, which translates into an increasing insolation level since the zero age main-sequence to present. This is particularly important for planet orbiting stars that are close to the terminal age main-sequence, whose luminosity have significantly increased since their formation.  A few examples of our models are presented in Figures 1.

Then, I will present different models of a sample of selected systems, which were validated, and  homogeneously characterized (both the stellar and planetary properties) in the context of the Warm gIaNts with TESS collaboration (WINE; Brahm et al. 2019).

Finally, I will compare their internal composition and metallicity with the planet mass and host star properties, and I will discuss these results in the context of planet formation scenarios for gas giants. 

Figure 1: Position of TOI-2529 b in the age-radius diagram (black dot). Planet evolutionary models with different envelope composition and insolation level are overplotted. For comparison, a simple model of Jupiter is also shown. Figure from Jones et al. (2024).