Fundamental Processes at Giant Planets in the Solar System and Beyond: Global heating and Saturn's Raining Rings

Atmospheres are important for habitability in the solar system and for the thousands of worlds discovered orbiting other stars. The escape of gas to space, which occurs in the upper atmosphere, determines how stable they are over time, with higher temperatures driving more escape. The upper atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn receive under 4% the amount of sunlight as Earth, so their upper atmospheres should be a frigid -70 degrees celsius, but instead, everywhere is measured to be over 200 degrees celsius.

This means that the Sun, which is responsible for heating the Earth's upper atmosphere, is not the main source of heating in the uppermost parts of these worlds, so what is the missing energy source? This problem has existed for 50-years, illustrating that our knowledge of atmospheres is shallow.

I will investigate the biggest processes known to affect global weather and climate, many of which I discovered recently. At Jupiter, powerful polar auroras may be leaking energy around the planet, occasionally boosted by the solar wind impacting the planet, while storms like the Great Red Spot add further heating. At Saturn, the rings rain into the planet, changing conditions where they fall and causing the rings to erode.

Finding the missing sources of heating and figuring out which are most important for global temperatures is a major goal of my proposed research. I am interested in uncovering how weather and climate work in the uppermost atmospheres of giant planets for the first time, in our solar system and around other stars.