Cloud modelling for brown dwarfs and exoplanets

Séminaire IPAG de Benjamin Charnay (LESIA), jeudi 12 octobre 2017 à 11h00, salle Manuel Forestini IPAG

Clouds and haze play a major role in planetary atmospheres, affecting radiative transfer, thermal structure, atmospheric dynamics and composition, as well as observational spectra. Most exoplanets observed by direct imaging or transit spectroscopy seem to be cloudy or hazy. These clouds and hazes block molecular absorption features, making the inference of the atmospheric composition complicated. During this seminar, I will review recent observations of clouds on brown dwarfs and exoplanets. I will after present 1D and 3D self-consistent cloud models, which allow to explain several observations of brown dwarfs, directly imaged young exoplanets and warm transiting exoplanets. These models also reveal what information about cloudy exoplanetary atmospheres could be obtained with the next generation of telescopes (i.e. JWST, ELT, ARIEL).