Jonathan Fortney (UC Santa Cruz) - Giant Planet Atmospheres and Interiors in the JWST Era

Title: Giant Planet Atmospheres and Interiors in the JWST Era

Abstrac:  Exoplanet characterization has the twin goals to understand “How planets work,” to shed light on their physics and chemistry, and “How planets form,” to use planetary properties today to inform aspects of their accretion in protoplanetary disks. I will discuss recent modeling work, closely tied to observations, that examines the atmosphere/interior connection for transiting planets, as we use JWST to probe ever-cooler giant planetary atmospheres, where non-equilibrium chemistry is a major atmospheric process. I will additionally showcase recent work on the mass-metallicity relation for the bulk composition of transiting gas giants, derived from thermal evolution models. This work shows that metal enrichment above stellar values is a hallmark giant planets as a class, which places new and strong constraints on the “core accretion” method of giant planet formation.