Hot-Jupiter radius inflation is the excess radius of many irradiated gas giants relative to standard cooling models of the same mass, composition and age. A young gas giant starts with high entropy and a large radius, but ordinarily contracts through Kelvin-Helmholtz contraction. An old inflated object must either retain that thermal reservoir unusually well or receive power that affects the deep interior.
The first class is delayed cooling of an inflated giant planet. Two specific mechanisms are increased atmospheric opacity, which makes internal radiation escape less readily, and inhibited interior convection caused by composition gradients, potentially with layered transport. Both slow entropy loss. Stellar irradiation can also maintain an outer radiative blanket, but an appropriate irradiated boundary is already included in many baseline models and does not alone explain every extreme radius.
The second class is heating of an inflated giant planet. Two mechanisms are tidal heating from eccentricity, obliquity or other time-dependent tidal forcing, and Joule heating from wind-driven electric currents in an ionized atmosphere coupled to the magnetic field. Mechanical energy carried inward from atmospheric circulation is another candidate. Heating must be deposited sufficiently deeply and with sufficient power; superficial absorption that is promptly reradiated is not equivalent to deep interior heating. A circular synchronized isolated orbit does not automatically provide a persistent tidal source.
The classes can coexist and are tested through radius-age-irradiation trends, orbital properties and the required energy budget. Merely changing an observed transit altitude by a few atmospheric scale heights is generally distinct from inflating the bulk giant-planet interior.
Articles by others on the same topic
There are currently no matching articles.