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Hauptverfasser: McCreery, Patrick, Santos, Leonardo A. Dos, Espinoza, Néstor, Allart, Romain, Kirk, James
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.03998
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author McCreery, Patrick
Santos, Leonardo A. Dos
Espinoza, Néstor
Allart, Romain
Kirk, James
author_facet McCreery, Patrick
Santos, Leonardo A. Dos
Espinoza, Néstor
Allart, Romain
Kirk, James
contents Over the past decade, observations of evaporating exoplanets have become increasingly common, driven by the discovery of the near-infrared helium-triplet line as a powerful probe of atmospheric escape. This process significantly influences the evolution of exoplanets, particularly those smaller than Jupiter. Both theoretical and observational studies have aimed to determine how efficiently exoplanets convert their host star's X-ray and ultraviolet (XUV) radiation into atmospheric mass loss. In this study, we employ the open-source atmospheric escape model p-winds to systematically analyze all publicly available helium triplet spectroscopic detections related to exoplanetary atmospheric escape. Our findings indicate that the retrieved outflows strongly depend on the ratio of XUV flux to planetary density ($F_{\text{XUV}}/ρ_p$), supporting the theoretical framework of energy-limited mass loss. We constrain population-level photoevaporative efficiencies to $0.34 \pm 0.13$ and $0.75 \pm 0.21$ for hydrogen-helium fractions of $0.90$ and $0.99$, respectively. These results offer new insights into exoplanetary atmospheric evolution and will aid future studies on exoplanet population demographics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_03998
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Tracing the Winds: A Uniform Interpretation of Helium Escape in Exoplanets from Archival Spectroscopic Observations
McCreery, Patrick
Santos, Leonardo A. Dos
Espinoza, Néstor
Allart, Romain
Kirk, James
Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
Over the past decade, observations of evaporating exoplanets have become increasingly common, driven by the discovery of the near-infrared helium-triplet line as a powerful probe of atmospheric escape. This process significantly influences the evolution of exoplanets, particularly those smaller than Jupiter. Both theoretical and observational studies have aimed to determine how efficiently exoplanets convert their host star's X-ray and ultraviolet (XUV) radiation into atmospheric mass loss. In this study, we employ the open-source atmospheric escape model p-winds to systematically analyze all publicly available helium triplet spectroscopic detections related to exoplanetary atmospheric escape. Our findings indicate that the retrieved outflows strongly depend on the ratio of XUV flux to planetary density ($F_{\text{XUV}}/ρ_p$), supporting the theoretical framework of energy-limited mass loss. We constrain population-level photoevaporative efficiencies to $0.34 \pm 0.13$ and $0.75 \pm 0.21$ for hydrogen-helium fractions of $0.90$ and $0.99$, respectively. These results offer new insights into exoplanetary atmospheric evolution and will aid future studies on exoplanet population demographics.
title Tracing the Winds: A Uniform Interpretation of Helium Escape in Exoplanets from Archival Spectroscopic Observations
topic Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.03998