Abstract
ABSTRACT The evolution of the atmospheres of low- and intermediate-mass planets is strongly connected to the physical properties of their host stars. The types and the past activities of planet-hosting stars can, therefore, affect the overall planetary population. In this paper, we perform a comparative study of sub-Neptune-like planets orbiting stars of different masses and different evolutionary histories. We discuss the general patterns of the evolved population as a function of parameters and environments of planets. As a model of the atmospheric evolution, we employ the own framework combining planetary evolution in Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (mesa) with the realistic prescription of the escape of hydrogen-dominated atmospheres. We find that the final populations look qualitatively similar in terms of the atmospheres survival around different stars, but qualitatively different, with this difference accentuated for planets orbiting more massive stars. We show that a planet has larger chances of keeping its primordial atmosphere in the habitable zone of a solar-mass star compared to M or K dwarfs and if it starts the evolution having a relatively compact envelope. We also address the problem of the uncertain initial temperatures (luminosities) of planets and show that this issue is only of particular importance for planets exposed to extreme atmospheric mass losses.
Highlights
For low-mass stars, we find the maximum differences in atmospheric mass loss caused by various activity histories are smaller than those caused by different stellar masses
We further exclude from consideration masses smaller than 10 ⊕ ; as we have shown in Kubyshkina et al (2018c) by direct hydrodynamic modeling, such low mass would not allow K2-33 b to sustain any atmosphere at the age of the system
The evolution of the atmospheres of low and intermediate mass planets is closely connected to the physical properties of their host stars
Summary
The evolution of planetary hydrogen-dominated atmospheres is controlled by the thermal evolution of the planet (e.g., Rogers & Seager 2010; Nettelmann et al 2011; Miller & Fortney 2011; Valencia et al 2013; Lopez, Fortney, & Miller 2012; Lopez & Fortney 2014), its atmospheric mass loss (e.g., Watson, Donahue, & Walker 1981; Lammer et al 2003, 2016; Erkaev et al 2007, 2016; Lecavelier des Etangs et al 2004; Owen & Wu 2016; Salz et al 2016; Kubyshkina et al 2018a; Gupta & Schlichting 2019, 2020), and is strongly dependent on the stellar environment around the planet. While in the previous version we considered a single model assuming solar-like host star with the XUV luminosity changing with time according to the power-law approximation by Ribas et al (2005), in the present version, we employ the set of stellar models by Johnstone, Bartel, & Güdel (2020). The latter allows to consistently model stellar XUV luminosity throughout the evolution for different stellar masses and allows to include various stellar activity histories. To stay consistent with the new XUV model, we change our prescription of the stellar heating (previously based on Choi et al 2016) to the equilibrium temperatures that are calculated from the stellar evolution tracks from Spada et al (2013)
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