How to constrain the physical properties of very hot super-earths with the James Web Space Telescope?
Abstract
Space missions dedicated to exoplanet transit detection led to the discovery of the first super-earths with a measured radius. Surprisingly, the two first rocky planets discovered, CoRoT-7b and Kepler 10b (Léger et al. 2009; Batalha et al. 2011) show very similar parameters: their radius is respectively 1.7 and 1.4 {R_{oplus}} and they orbitate around (resp.) a K and a G star in 0.85 days. The properties of this two objects are expected to be very exotic (Léger et al. 2011). We expect them to be phase locked, with a large lava ocean on the irradiated face (with T reaching 2500 K and 3000 K, respectively) and cold hemisphere with a temperature lower than 50-75 K. We look for observational tests to validate this model among a larger family of models. We suggest to make an observation with the instrument NIRCam on the futur JWST. We investigate the amount of information that such an observation would provide on the physical and dynamical properties of CoRoT-7b, and we focus in particular on two parameters that could influence the surface nature of the very hot super-earth: the albedo, and the phase-locking.
- Publication:
-
SF2A-2012: Proceedings of the Annual meeting of the French Society of Astronomy and Astrophysics
- Pub Date:
- December 2012
- Bibcode:
- 2012sf2a.conf..251S
- Keywords:
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- super-earth;
- CoRoT-7b;
- JWST;
- lava ocean