Exoplanets & Exomoons

Breezing Through The Space Environment of Barnard's Star b

By Keith Cowing
Press Release
astro-ph.SR
January 2, 2019
Filed under
Breezing Through The Space Environment of Barnard's Star b
Barnard's Star
NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

A physically realistic stellar wind model based on Alfvén wave dissipation has been used to simulate the wind from Barnard’s Star and to calculate the conditions at the location of its recently discovered planetary companion.

Barnard’s Star b experiences much less intense wind pressure than the much more close-in planet Proxima~b and the planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system. The milder wind conditions are more a result of its much greater orbital distance rather than in differences in the surface magnetic field strengths of the host stars. The dynamic pressure is on average 15 times higher than experienced by the present-day Earth, and undergoes variations by factors of several as it passes through the current sheet in each orbit. The magnetospause standoff distance is ∼30−60% smaller than that of the Earth for an equivalent planetary magnetic field strength.

Comments: J. D. Alvarado-G\’omez & C. Garraffo contributed equally to this work. 7 Pages, 2 Figures. Submitted to The
Julián D. Alvarado-Gómez (1), Cecilia Garraffo (2,1), Jeremy J. Drake (1), Benjamin P. Brown (3), Jeffrey S. Oishi (4), Sofia P. Moschou (1), Ofer Cohen (5) ((1) Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, (2) Institute for Applied Computational Science, Harvard University (3) Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences, Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Colorado at Boulder (4) Department of Physics and Astronomy, Bates College (5) University of Massachusetts at Lowell, Department of Physics & Applied Physics)
(Submitted on 1 Jan 2019)

Astrophysical Journal Letters
Subjects: Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR); Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:1901.00219 [astro-ph.SR] (or arXiv:1901.00219v1 [astro-ph.SR] for this version)
Submission history
From: Julián David Alvarado-Gómez Dr. rer. nat.
[v1] Tue, 1 Jan 2019 23:00:34 UTC (2,276 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.00219
Astrobiology

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