Pith. sign in

REVIEW

Do the TRAPPIST-1 Planets Have Hydrogen-rich Atmospheres?

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 1912.05749 v3 pith:TH3LTM5O submitted 2019-12-12 astro-ph.EP

Do the TRAPPIST-1 Planets Have Hydrogen-rich Atmospheres?

classification astro-ph.EP
keywords planetsatmosphereshydrogen-richtrappist-1diskaccretedtrappist-1-likeamount
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
Share X Bluesky LinkedIn Reddit HN
read the original abstract

Recently, transmission spectroscopy in the atmospheres of the TRAPPIST-1 planets revealed flat and featureless absorption spectra, which rule out cloud-free hydrogen-dominated atmospheres. Earth-sized planets orbiting TRAPPIST-1 likely have either a clear or a cloudy/hazy hydrogen-poor atmosphere. In this paper, we investigate whether a proposed formation scenario is consistent with expected atmospheric compositions of the TRAPPIST-1 planets. We examine the amount of a hydrogen-rich gas that TRAPPIST-1-like planets accreted from the ambient disk until disk dispersal. Since TRAPPIST-1 planets are trapped into a resonant chain, we simulate disk gas accretion onto a migrating TRAPPIST-1-like planet. We find that the amount of an accreted hydrogen-rich gas is as small as 10$^{-2}$ wt% and 0.1 wt% for TRAPPIST-1b and 1c, 10$^{-2}$ wt% for 1d, 1 wt% for 1e, a few wt% for 1f and 1g and 1 wt% for 1h, respectively. We also calculate a long-term thermal evolution of TRAPPIST-1-like planets after disk dissipation and estimate the mass loss of their hydrogen-rich atmospheres driven by a stellar X-ray and UV irradiation. We find that all the accreted hydrogen-rich atmospheres can be lost via hydrodynamic escape. Therefore, we conclude that TRAPPIST-1 planets should have no primordial hydrogen-rich gases but secondary atmospheres such as a Venus-like one and water vapor, if they currently retain atmospheres.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.