Journal article : Review
Atmospheric dynamics of hot giant planets and brown dwarfs
- Abstract:
- Groundbased and spacecraft telescopic observations, combined with an intensive modeling effort, have greatly enhanced our understanding of hot giant planets and brown dwarfs over the past ten years. Although these objects are all fluid, hydrogen worlds with stratified atmospheres overlying convective interiors, they exhibit an impressive diversity of atmospheric behavior. Hot Jupiters are strongly irradiated, and a wealth of observations constrain the day-night temperature differences, circulation, and cloudiness. The intense stellar irradiation, presumed tidal locking and modest rotation leads to a novel regime of strong day-night radiative forcing. Circulation models predict large day-night temperature differences, global-scale eddies, patchy clouds, and, in most cases, a fast eastward jet at the equator—equatorial superrotation. The warm Jupiters lie farther from their stars and are not generally tidally locked, so they may exhibit a wide range of rotation rates, obliquities, and orbital eccentricities, which, along with the weaker irradiation, leads to circulation patterns and observable signatures predicted to differ substantially from hot Jupiters. Brown dwarfs are typically isolated, rapidly rotating worlds; they radiate enormous energy fluxes into space and convect vigorously in their interiors. Their atmospheres exhibit patchiness in clouds and temperature on regional to global scales—the result of modulation by large-scale atmospheric circulation. Despite the lack of irradiation, such circulations can be driven by interaction of the interior convection with the overlying atmosphere, as well as self-organization of patchiness due to cloud-dynamical-radiative feedbacks. Finally, irradiated brown dwarfs help to bridge the gap between these classes of objects, experiencing intense external irradiation as well as vigorous interior convection. Collectively, these diverse objects span over six orders of magnitude in intrinsic heat flux and incident stellar flux, and two orders of magnitude in rotation rate—thereby placing strong constraints on how the circulation of giant planets (broadly defined) depend on these parameters. A hierarchy of modeling approaches have yielded major new insights into the dynamics governing these phenomena.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, 22.2MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1007/s11214-020-00758-8
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer
- Journal:
- Space Science Reviews More from this journal
- Volume:
- 216
- Issue:
- 8
- Article number:
- 139
- Publication date:
- 2020-12-01
- Acceptance date:
- 2020-10-29
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1572-9672
- ISSN:
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0038-6308
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Subtype:
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Review
- Pubs id:
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1150481
- Local pid:
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pubs:1150481
- Deposit date:
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2021-02-02
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Showman et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2020
- Rights statement:
- Copyright © 2020 The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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