Morphology of Hydrodynamic Winds: A Study of Planetary Winds in Stellar Environments

Abstract

Bathed in intense ionizing radiation, close-in gaseous planets undergo hydrodynamic atmospheric escape, which ejects the upper extent of their atmospheres into the interplanetary medium. Ultraviolet detections of escaping gas around transiting planets corroborate such a framework. Exposed to the stellar environment, the outflow is shaped by its interaction with the stellar wind and by the planet's orbit. We model these effects using Athena to perform 3-D radiative-hydrodynamic simulations of tidally-locked hydrogen atmospheres receiving large amounts of ionizing extreme-ultraviolet flux in various stellar environments for the low-magnetic-field case. Through a step-by-step exploration of orbital and stellar wind effects on the planetary outflow, we find three structurally distinct stellar wind regimes: weak, intermediate, and strong. We perform synthetic Lyman-$\alpha$ observations and find unique observational signatures for each regime. A weak stellar wind$\textrm{---}$which cannot confine the planetary outflow, leading to a torus of material around the star$\textrm{---}$has a pre-transit, red-shifted dayside arm and a slightly redward-skewed spectrum during transit. The intermediate regime truncates the dayside outflow at large distances from the planet and causes periodic disruptions of the outflow, producing observational signatures that mimic a double transit. The first of these dips is blue-shifted and precedes the optical transit. Finally, strong stellar winds completely confine the outflow into a cometary tail and accelerate the outflow outwards, producing large blue-shifted signals post-transit. Across all three regimes, large signals occur far outside of transit, offering motivation to continue ultraviolet observations outside of direct transit.