We simulate atmospheric fractionation in escaping planetary atmospheres using IsoFATE, a new open-source numerical model. We expand the parameter space studied previously to planets with tenuous atmospheres that exhibit the greatest helium and deuterium enhancement. We simulate the effects of extreme-ultraviolet-driven photoevaporation and core-powered mass loss on deuterium–hydrogen and helium–hydrogen fractionation of sub-Neptune atmospheres around G, K, and M stars. Our simulations predict prominent populations of deuterium- and helium-enhanced planets along the upper edge of the radius valley with mean equilibrium temperatures of ≈370 K and as low as 150 K across stellar types. We find that fractionation is mechanism dependent, so constraining He/H and D/H abundances in sub-Neptune atmospheres offers a unique strategy to investigate the origin of the radius valley around low-mass stars. Fractionation is also strongly dependent on retained atmospheric mass, offering a proxy for planetary surface pressure as well as a way to distinguish between desiccated enveloped terrestrials and water worlds. Deuterium-enhanced planets tend to be helium dominated and CH4 depleted, providing a promising strategy to observe HDO in the 3.7 μm window. We present a list of promising targets for observational follow-up.
Strong Fractionation of Deuterium and Helium in Sub-Neptune Atmospheres along the Radius Valley
Abstract
Copyright and License
© 2024. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
Acknowledgement
We thank Omar Jatoi for his support in parallelizing the IsoFATE code, a requisite for efficiently performing Monte Carlo simulations that made this study possible.
This research has made use of the NASA Exoplanet Archive, which is operated by the California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under the Exoplanet Exploration Program. The data can be accessed via the NASA Exoplanet Archive. 8
R.W. acknowledges funding from NSF-CAREER award AST-1847120 and Virtual Planetary Laboratory (VPL) award UWSC10439.
Software References
scikit-learn (Pedregosa et al. 2011) and SciPy (Virtanen et al. 2020)
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Additional details
- ISSN
- 1538-4357
- National Science Foundation
- AST-1847120
- University of Washington
- UWSC10439