Irradiated brown dwarfs: Providing insights into exoplanet atmospheres

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• Sarah Casewell
• Wednesday 15 January 2020, 14:00-15:00
• PW-SR1 (103) .

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr Matteo Bianconi.

Brown dwarfs are often described as failed stars, however the flip side of this description is that they can also be described as over-ambitious planets. With masses between 13-70 Jupiter masses they have cool atmospheres dominated by cloud features, molecules and show features due to weather. These atmospheres have a lot of similarities with atmospheres we see in planets in our solar system, and also directly imaged exoplanets. The question then is: How like hot Jupiters are irradiated brown dwarfs? In this seminar I will describe the known irradiated brown dwarfs and how they evolve into post-common envelope systems containing a white dwarf. These rare binaries have very short periods (~hrs) and the brown dwarf is irradiated by the white dwarf companion, often with large amounts of UV radiation. I will discuss the atmospheres of these highly irradiated brown dwarfs and their similarities with irradiated exoplanets.

This talk is part of the Astrophysics Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Astrophysics Seminars
• Bham Talks
• PW-SR1 (103)
• What's on in Physics?

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