Paul Mollière
Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie (Heidelberg, Allemagne)
Webinaire, Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris
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| « Measuring and interpreting the abundances of exoplanet atmospheres » |
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Paul Mollière |
| With new and upcoming observing facilities, the exoplanet community is poised to precisely measure the chemical inventory of exoplanet atmospheres. In my talk I will focus on how we derived, for the first time, precise constraints on the atmospheric carbon and oxygen content of directly imaged planets, using the VLT’s GRAVITY interferometer. I will also discuss how high-resolution spectra allow to obtain similar constraints for strongly irradiated planets, and what information observations of future telescopes such as JWST and ARIEL will yield. Such atmospheric abundance measurements will allow to investigate whether one of the greatest promises of atmospheric characterization studies holds up: inverting the atmospheric composition to infer a planet’s formation history. I will show how such measurements allow to constrain planetary formation when simple and popular models for the composition of the protoplanetary disk and formation process are used. At the same time, I will discuss how such assumptions are too strongly simplified for making the exoplanet atmosphere - formation connection in practice, and what the most pressing challenges are. Achieving this connection will be, if even possible, a formidable and interdisciplinary challenge, but the exciting exoplanet observations that lie ahead will allow the community to start tackle this goal in earnest. |
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vendredi 8 octobre 2021 - 11:00 Webinaire, Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris |
| Page web du séminaire / Seminar's webpage |