Over the last three decades, we have been able to discover all kinds of strange planets we never knew existed, having no analog in our solar system. Super-Earths can be up to 10 times more massive than Earth with a wide variety of planetary compositions. However, we don’t yet know enough about these planets. This presentation aims to explore the atmospheric physics and chemistry of 55 Cancri e, an ultra-short period super-Earth. Evidence suggests that it has a high mean molecular weight atmosphere, and the talk will focus on (i) Nitrogen and Sulfur chemistry and (ii) Outgassing chemistry. I will introduce our state-of-the-art forward model of exoplanet atmospheres, which combines the radiative-convective equilibrium model with melt-vapor equilibrium and photo-chemical kinetics. This model is used to constrain atmospheric physics, such as temperature-pressure profiles, and atmospheric chemistry, such as chemical abundances. I will also present the simulated transmission and emission spectra of 55 Cancri e's atmosphere, varying in different initial elemental abundances, along with the observability of the spectra using JWST. Finally, I will conclude by discussing about our ongoing observations at 3.6 m DOT using TANSPEC for transit spectroscopic study of exoplanet XO-2N b, and at 1.3 m DFOT for transit photometric study of the exoplanets WASP-77 A b and K2-28 b.
The speaker is a PhD student in NISER working on exo-planet.