Dynamic mineral clouds on HD 189733b II. Monte Carlo radiative transfer for 3D cloudy exoplanet atmospheres: combining scattering and emission spectra

2017
As the 3D spatial properties of exoplanetatmospheres are being observed in increasing detail by current and new generations of telescopes, the modelling of the 3D scattering effects of cloud forming atmospheres with inhomogeneous opacity structures becomes increasingly important to interpret observational data. We model the scattering and emission properties of a simulated cloud forming, inhomogeneous opacity, hot Jupiteratmosphere of HD 189733b. We compare our results to available HST and Spitzer data and quantify the effects of 3D multiple-scattering on observable properties of the atmosphere. We discuss potential observational properties of HD 189733b for the upcoming TESS and CHEOPS missions. We develop a Monte Carlo radiative transfer code and apply it to post-process output of our 3D radiative-hydrodynamic, cloud formation simulation of HD 189733b. We employ three variance reductiontechniques; next event estimation, survival biasing and composite emission biasing to improve signal-to-noise of the output.For cloud particle scattering events, a log-normal area distribution is constructed from the 3D cloud formation RHD results and stochastically sampled in order to model the Rayleigh and Mie scatteringbehaviour of a mixture of grain sizes. Stellar photon packets incident on the eastern dayside hemisphere show predominantly Rayleigh, single-scattering behaviour, while multiple-scattering occurs on the western hemisphere. Combined scattered and thermal emitted light predictions are consistent with published HST and Spitzer secondary transit observations. Our model predictions are also consistent with geometric albedoconstraints from optical wavelength ground based polarimetryand HST B-bandmeasurements. We predict an apparent geometric albedofor HD 189733b of 0.205 and 0.229, in the TESS and CHEOPS photometric bands respectively.
    • Correction
    • Cite
    • Save
    • Machine Reading By IdeaReader
    1
    References
    0
    Citations
    NaN
    KQI
    []
    Baidu
    map