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SUMMARY:Heated snowballs\, Batman! a.k.a. Interior and atmospheric structu
 res of hot watery super-Earths - Scott Thomas (Cambridge)
DTSTART:20170222T160000Z
DTEND:20170222T170000Z
UID:TALK69718@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Ed Gillen
DESCRIPTION:We are discovering more and more super-Earths\, and we would l
 ike constraints on their compositions to investigate whether they are more
  similar to rocky Earth or gaseous Neptune. We therefore need numerical mo
 dels of their interiors. These models often exclude any thermal effects\, 
 but this is not a good choice for planets with thick oceans or watery atmo
 spheres. Water has a rich and interesting thermal behaviour: at high press
 ure and temperature it can be in any of several exotic plasma and ice phas
 es. Planets with thick water layers\, known as waterworlds\, cannot theref
 ore be accurately represented by models that treat them as cold spheres. B
 ut understanding how waterworlds vary in size and structure is important a
 s we seek to interpret new observations of super-Earths. During my PhD\, I
  developed temperature-dependent structure models of waterworlds\, treatin
 g both the interior structure and the atmosphere and including both intern
 al and external heating. I showed the following: heat can significantly af
 fect a watery planet’s size and structure\; these planets can have large
  and diffuse yet opaque atmospheres\; and a planet can have a hot extended
  steam atmosphere even if only moderately heated from the inside. I also c
 onsidered what happens when a waterworld migrates and what this could mean
  for the astrobiological properties of such a planet. I will present some 
 of these results from my recently submitted PhD.
LOCATION:Martin Ryle Seminar Room\, Kavli Institute
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