Schedule Apr 02, 2010
Interior Structure of GJ436b and GJ1214b
Nadine Nettelmann (UCSC)

Nadine Nettelmann (1,2), Jonathan Fortney (1), Ulrike Kramm (2), Ronald Redmer (2)
(1): University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064 (2): Universitaet Rostock, 18051 Rostock, Germany

The first transiting Neptune-mass planet GJ436b (Mp=23 ME) and the 'planet of the decade' GJ1214b (Mp=6.5 ME) have slightly larger radii than theoretical cold ice planets. Warm water however is an appealing assumption to explain the observed mass, radius, and effective temperature of these planets.

We present interior structure models for these planets ranging from water to rocky planets with H-He atmospheres. These models include a new state-of-the-art first principles EOS for water. In case of GJ436b, we consider a wide range of atmospheric temperatures and investigate constraints from the potentially observable k2 tidal Love number. In case of GJ1214b, we couple the interior models to non-grey atmosphere models and investigate both the structure and thermal evolution of the planet over the last several Gyr.

Author entry (protected)