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Silicate, ruby, opal – Why gas giants keep their jewels in the atmosphere

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2007

Christiane Helling
Christiane Helling*
Affiliation:
SUPA, School of Physics & Astronomy, University of St Andrews, North Haugh, St Andrews, KY16 9SS, Scotland, UK email: [email protected]
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Abstract

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Giant gas-planets - and brown dwarfs - form dust clouds in their atmospheres which are made of a variety of gemstone-like and possible liquid materials. Our theoretical approach, where we calculate homogeneous nucleation, heterogeneous growth/evaporation, gravitational settling, and element consumption for composite dust grains, allows to access the evolution of the dust complex in the cloud, and hence also the elements remaining in the gas phase. The cloud formation process is imprinted into these remaining elements. Following a (T, p) trajectory into the atmosphere we observe that 1. metals disappear, 2. dust forms, 3. metals re-appear, 4. dust disappears. For the first time, our kinetic cloud formation approach is coupled with an 1D atmosphere simulation and, hence, synthetic spectra can be produced based on detailed cloud micro-physics. Results are demonstrated for metal-poor gas giants and the strong influence of the dust modelling on alkali-line profile is shown.

Keywords

astrochemistryradiative transfermethods: numericalstars: atmospheresstars: low-massbrown dwarfsplanets: atmospheres
Type
Contributed Papers
Information
Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union , Volume 3 , Symposium S249: Exoplanets: Detection, Formation and Dynamics , October 2007 , pp. 167 - 172
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2008

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