João Mendonça
DTU SPACE, National Space Institute, Technical University of Denmark

Abstract
In the last two decades, the astrophysical community discovered a multitude of planets orbiting other stars. The variety of planetary environments that these exoplanets may harbour is still unknown. Most importantly, this discovery propels the fundamental scientific and philosophical quest of searching for the first detection of life beyond our own planet. As more observational data become available, models of exoplanetary atmospheres are essential, at a first level to interpret the data and more importantly to reproduce and explain the physical and chemical processes that generate the climate of planets. The new virtual-lab, OASIS, is a 3D planetary model that we have been developing from scratch to study planet habitability and search for life in exoplanets. My new planetary virtual lab includes a new state-of-the-art 3D atmospheric model (THOR) coupled self-consistently with other modules that represent the main physical and chemical processes that shape planetary climates and their evolution. I will present the modules of OASIS and show recent results of applying OASIS to Venus-like environments. I will show that OASIS is successful at simulating the challenging Venus-like conditions and at reproducing Venus observational data. I will describe the main advantages of using OASIS compared with other models, and discuss how our new results establish OASIS as a robust and efficient tool to simulate a large diversity of planetary environments.

2019 December 11, 13:30

IA/U.Porto
Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto (Auditorium)
Rua das Estrelas, 4150-762 Porto