CAREER: Modeling of Super-Earth Atmospheres - Looking Toward the James Webb Space Telescope and Beyond

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

Observations of planets around other stars will be one of the main targets of the future James Webb Space Telescope and the 30-meter diameter telescopes under construction here on the Earth. The investigator will create computer programs to model the observations of the atmospheric structure and composition of those planets near to Earth in size, or super-Earths. These programs will be used to study the characteristics of atmospheres, focusing on their temperatures and pressures, of many different types of super-Earths. The investigator will make these programs broadly available to other scientists to use for their research. This project serves the national interest as it helps our scientific understanding of the properties of planets around other stars that are similar to the Earth, and which could harbor life. The investigator will also teach special courses for students with a low level of STEM preparation, and create a peer mentoring program for STEM students coming from backgrounds that traditionally are not represented in these fields, to fight lower success rates in STEM classes at her home institution. The investigator will build a set of computational tools that will be broadly applicable to modeling the radiative transfer and atmospheric chemistry for low-mass exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy. The research will first complete the development of Exo-RT, a robust radiative transfer (RT) suite of codes that will calculate atmospheric structure (temperature-pressure profiles), emission spectra, and transmission spectra for transiting exoplanets. The key improvement of this RT suite over existing codes is its inherent ability to model atmospheres of arbitrary atmospheric composition, making it ideally suited toward modeling a diverse set of super-Earths. The fully developed code will then be applied to a number of studies of super-Earth atmospheres, determining the extent to which the attributes of a super-Earth can be inferred from observations of its atmosphere and measurements of its bulk density. Atmospheric studies of super Earths are a key science motivation for future exoplanet investigations with the James Webb Space Telescope and ground-based 30-meter class telescopes. At her home institution, Grinnell College, the investigator will also implement a spatial reasoning course for students with a low level of STEM preparation, and a peer mentoring program for STEM students from traditionally underrepresented groups, to combat lower success rates in STEM classes.