Abstract Details


Name: Gopal Hazra
Affiliation: IIT Kanpur
Conference ID: TVS202510270
Title: The role of stellar coronal mass ejections in driving exoplanet space weather
Authors and Co-Authors:
Abstract Type: Invited by SOC
Abstract: It has been understood that coronal mass ejections (CMEs) plays a crucial role in disrupting the atmospheres of solar system planets. For close-in exoplanets, the stellar radiation drives thermal planetary outflow that further interacts with the stellar wind and stellar coronal mass ejections, making it susceptible to non-thermal loss. How CMEs are going to affect atmospheric loss depends on various CME properties such as density, velocity, temperature, and magnetic field of CME plasma. For the planets with a magnetosphere, the embedded magnetic field in the CMEs is the most important parameter to affect the planetary mass loss. In this talk, I will be discussing the effect of different magnetic field structures of stellar CMEs on the atmospheres of a hot Jupiter and a super Earth with a dipolar magnetosphere. We use a 3D MHD atmospheric escape model, which self-consistently models the atmospheric outflow with the included planetary magnetosphere and its interaction with the CMEs. We consider three configurations of magnetic field embedded in stellar CMEs -- (a) radial component, (b) Bz component, (c)southward Bz component. We calculated atmospheric mass loss for these three different cases and found that CMEs with Bz components are most effective in removing planetary materials. We also calculated the Ly-alpha transit signatures in the different phases of the CME passage for the three cases to constrain the CME's effect observationally. Results will be presented in detail for both the hot Jupiter and super Earth.