H3+ cooling in planetary atmospheres

Steve Miller*, Tom Stallard, Henrik Melin, Jonathan Tennyson

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

59 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

We review the role of H3+ in planetary atmospheres, with a particular emphasis on its effect in cooling and stabilising, an effect that has been termed the “H3+ thermostat” (see Miller et al., Philos. Trans. R. Soc. London, Ser. A, 2000, 58, 2485). In the course of our analysis of this effect, we found that cooling functions that make use of the partition function, Q(T) based on the calculated H3+ energy levels of Neale and Tennyson (Astrophys. J., 1995, 454, L169) may underestimate just how much energy this ion is radiating to space. So we present a new fit to the calculated values of Q(T) that is accurate to within 2% for the range 100 K to 10 000 K, a very significant improvement on the fit originally provided by Neale and Tennyson themselves. We also present a fit to Q(T) calculated from only those values Neale and Tennyson computed from first principles, which may be more appropriate for planetary scientists wishing to calculate the amount of atmospheric cooling from the H3+ ion.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)283-291
Number of pages9
JournalFaraday Discussions
Volume147
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 7 Jul 2010
Externally publishedYes

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