Poster Abstracts

Name/Affiliation:  T. Karalidi (Steward Observatory, University of Arizona)

Title:  Maps of brown dwarf atmospheres

Abstract:
Based on the composition and radius of brown dwarfs we would expect their atmospheres to be comparable to those of directly detected giant exoplanets. Fitting of models to observations though, suggest that brown dwarf atmospheres have different cloud structure than giant exoplanet atmospheres. Here, we present a new code to map the atmospheres of exoplanets and brown dwarfs. Our code is built within the frame of the "Extrasolar Storms" Spitzer Exploration Science project, that observes brown dwarfs with Spitzer and Hubble Space telescopes. With our code we can compare the cloud coverage of brown dwarfs and directly detected giant exoplanets and explore how cloud distribution changes with time and altitude for the first time. We validate our code against observations of previously mapped planets and present first maps of the atmospheres of brown dwarfs observed within the Storms project.