6 papers
Super-Earth Interiors Shrink by About 10% as They Crystallise
Tim Lichtenberg, Mara Attia, Harrison Nicholls +26
Super-Earth exoplanets are among the most abundant planets known, yet their bulk densities leave the interior state degenerate. The static structure models used to interpret them,…
Evolutionary pathways toward survival of a thick CO2- or SO2-rich atmosphere on the lava world TOI-561 b
Emma Postolec, Tim Lichtenberg, Johanna K. Teske +10
Rocky planets evolve through the exchange of volatiles between their interiors and atmospheres, an interplay still poorly constrained by observations. Remarkably, highly irradiated…
Atmospheric escape fractionates secondary but not primary atmospheres
Mara Attia, Tim Lichtenberg
A planet's atmosphere, heated by starlight, can flow off as a wind, taking some gases and leaving others in unknown proportions. Yet this selection wrote the noble-gas records of t…
Reflation: redox-driven atmospheric inflation as tracer of super-Earth geochemistry
Lorenzo Cesario, Tim Lichtenberg, Mara Attia +3
We demonstrate that the redox-sensitivity of mantle outgassing can trigger transient episodes of atmospheric re-inflation in highly irradiated and geochemically-reduced super-Earth…
The panchromatic JWST dayside spectrum of WASP-121 b reveals a refractory-rich formation
K. Angelique Kahle, Paul Mollière, Laura Kreidberg +16
One path to understand how planets form is to link their present-day atmospheric composition to predictions from planet formation models. For the hottest planets, the abundances of…
PALEOS: Multiphase equations of state and mass-radius relations for exoplanet interiors
Mara Attia, Tim Lichtenberg, Ema Jungová +1
Modeling the interior of a rocky or water-rich exoplanet is a thermodynamic closure problem: every layer's density, temperature gradient, and phase must follow from an equation of…