Water-Cooled (sub)-Neptunes Get Better Gas Mileage

Abstract

The demographics of sub-Jovian planets around low-mass stars is dominated by populations of ``sub-Neptunes" and ``super-Earths", distinguished by the presence or absence of envelopes of low-molecular weight volatiles, i.e., H2, He, and H2O. The current paradigm is that sub-Neptunes on close-in orbits evolve into super-Earths via atmospheric escape driven by high-energy stellar irradiation. We use an integrated hydrodynamic-radiation-chemical network model of outflow to demonstrate that this escape is modulated by the abundance of H2O, an efficient infrared coolant. Increasing H2O/H2 at the base of the flow induces an order-of-magnitude decline in escape rate, with definitive consequences for retention of envelopes over Gyr. We show that saturation limits on H2O in the upper atmospheres of temperate sub-Neptunes could explain the paradoxical observations that these objects disappear more rapidly than their counterparts closer to their host stars. We also propose that the scarcity of sub-Neptunes around very low mass stars could be related to the water-poor chemistry of their antecedent protoplanetary disks. Observations of atmospheric H2O by JWST as well as searches for atmospheric escape from younger planets using H and He lines could test these predictions.