Examining Tatooine: Atmospheric Models of Neptune-Like Circumbinary Planets

Abstract

Circumbinary planets experience a time varying irradiation pattern as they orbit their two host stars. In this work, we present the first detailed study of the atmospheric effects of this irradiation pattern on known and hypothetical gaseous circumbinary planets. Using both a one-dimensional Energy Balance Model and a three-dimensional General Circulation Model, we look at the temperature differences between circumbinary planets and their equivalent single-star cases in order to determine the nature of the atmospheres of these planets. We find that for circumbinary planets on stable orbits around their host stars, temperature differences are on average no more than 1.0% in the most extreme cases. Based on detailed modeling with the General Circulation Model, we find that these temperature differences are not large enough to excite circulation differences between the two cases. We conclude that gaseous circumbinary planets can be treated as their equivalent single-star case in future atmospheric modeling efforts.

9 pages, 7 figures, Accepted to ApJ

References in corpus (12)

• Most 1.6 Earth-Radius Planets are not Rocky
• The Transiting Circumbinary Planets Kepler-34 and Kepler-35
• Multi-Wavelength Constraints on the Day-Night Circulation Patterns of HD 189733b
• The 4.5 $\mu$m full-orbit phase curve of the hot Jupiter HD 209458b
• On the Abundance of Circumbinary Planets
• Kepler-1647b: the largest and longest-period Kepler transiting circumbinary planet
• 3.6 and 4.5 $\mu$m Phase Curves of the Highly-Irradiated Eccentric Hot Jupiter WASP-14b
• Gaia's potential for the discovery of circumbinary planets
• Secondary eclipse observations for seven hot-Jupiters from the Anglo-Australian Telescope
• Modeling the surface temperature of Earth-like planets
• A temperature inversion in WASP-33b? Large Binocular Telescope occultation data confirm significant thermal flux at short wavelengths
• Observations of Transiting Exoplanets with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (PASP), December 2014

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Modeling the effects of inhomogeneous aerosols on the hot Jupiter Kepler-7b's atmospheric circulation
• THOR 2.0: Major Improvements to the Open-Source General Circulation Model
• Milankovitch Cycles of Terrestrial Planets in Binary Star Systems
• Models of Warm Jupiter Atmospheres: Observable Signatures of Obliquity
• Constraining the magnitude of climate extremes from time-varying instellation on a circumbinary terrestrial planet
• From Super-Earths to Mini-Neptunes: Implications of a Surface on Atmospheric Circulation
• An Energy Balance Model for Rapidly and Synchronously Rotating Terrestrial Planets
• Statistical properties of habitable zones in stellar binary systems
• Warm Jupiters Beyond the Tidal Synchronization Limit May Exhibit a Wide Range of Secondary Eclipse Depths
• Effects of Flux Variation on the Surface Temperatures of Earth-like Circumbinary Planets
• Planetary Rhythms: Synchronous Circulation on Variably Irradiated Asynchronous Planets