Atmospheric Escape and Evolution of Exoplanets

Atmospheric Escape and Evolution of Exoplanets

Leonardo Augusto Gonçalves dos Santos
STSI, USA

We have recently hit the milestone of 5,000 exoplanets discovered. In a stark contrast with the Solar System, most of the exoplanets we know to date orbit extremely close to their host stars, causing them to lose copious amounts of gas through atmospheric escape at some stage in their lives. In some planets, this process can be so dramatic that they shrink in timescales of a few millions to billions of years, imprinting features in the demographics of transiting exoplanets. Depending on the transit geometry, ionizing conditions, and atmospheric properties, a planetary outflow can be observed using transmission spectroscopy in the ultraviolet and near-infrared. In this talk, I will discuss the observations and evidence of atmospheric escape in planets outside the Solar System. I will give a special attention to the different techniques used to make these observations, their respective advantages and disadvantages. I will also briefly discuss the impact of atmospheric escape in the evolution of small exoplanets, and how we plan to test our hypotheses using observations in the coming future.

Leonardo dos Santos obteve seu mestrado na Universidade de São Paulo e doutorado na Universidade de Genebra (Suíça). Atualmente, ele é um Post-doctoral Fellow no Space Telescope Science Institute, onde faz pesquisa na área de atmosferas em exoplanetas e é astrônomo de suporte para o Hubble Space Telescope.

Google Meet: https://meet.google.com/pcw-gmem-jyi
Link da transmissão: https://www.youtube.com/c/AstronomiaIAGUSP/live