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  • Overcoming the Limitations ...
    Kubyshkina, D.; Fossati, L.; Erkaev, N. V.; Cubillos, P. E.; Johnstone, C. P.; Kislyakova, K. G.; Lammer, H.; Lendl, M.; Odert, P.

    Astrophysical journal. Letters, 10/2018, Letnik: 866, Številka: 2
    Journal Article

    Studies of planetary atmospheric composition, variability, and evolution require appropriate theoretical and numerical tools to estimate key atmospheric parameters, among which the mass-loss rate is often the most important. In evolutionary studies, it is common to use the energy-limited formula, which is attractive for its simplicity but ignores important physical effects and can be inaccurate in many cases. To overcome this problem, we consider a recently developed grid of about 7000 one-dimensional upper-atmosphere hydrodynamic models computed for a wide range of planets with hydrogen-dominated atmospheres from which we extract the mass-loss rates. The grid boundaries are 1:39 in planetary mass, 1:10 in planetary radius, 300:2000 K in equilibrium temperature, 0.4:1.3 in host star's mass, 0.002:1.3 au in orbital separation, and about 1026:5×1030 erg s−1 in stellar X-ray and extreme ultraviolet luminosity. We then derive an analytical expression for the atmospheric mass-loss rates based on a fit to the values obtained from the grid. The expression provides the mass-loss rates as a function of planetary mass, planetary radius, orbital separation, and incident stellar high-energy flux. We show that this expression is a significant improvement to the energy-limited approximation for a wide range of planets. The analytical expression presented here enables significantly more accurate planetary evolution computations without increasing computing time.