The Impact of Irradiation on the Radius and Thermal Evolution of Transiting Brown Dwarfs

Abstract Masses and radii of transiting brown dwarfs can be measured directly, in contrast to isolated field brown dwarfs, whose mass and radius inferences are model dependent. Therefore, transiting brown dwarfs are a test bed for the interior and evolutionary models of brown dwarfs and giant exoplanets. We have developed atmospheric and evolutionary models for this emerging population. We show that intense stellar irradiation can cause a large enhancement in the radius of transiting brown dwarfs at all masses, especially if the incident flux exceeds log 10 ( F /cgs) ≥ 9 ( T eq ≥ 1450 K). Stellar irradiation can significantly alter rates of nuclear burning in irradiated brown dwarfs, making the deuterium-burning and hydrogen-burning minimum masses strong functions of incident stellar flux. We show that the D-burning and H-burning minimum masses can decrease by 16% and 13%, respectively, between isolated and strongly irradiated brown dwarfs (log 10 ( F /cgs) ≥ 10 ( T eq ≥ 2570 K)). This shows that stellar irradiation has a larger impact on the planet-brown dwarf-star mass boundaries than metallicity or clouds. We show that metal cores or migration affect their evolution to a much lesser extent, whereas low mass highly irradiated old sources can help us test the physics of the hot Jupiter radius anomaly. We fit the observed radii of 46 transiting brown dwarfs and show that our irradiated evolutionary models fit their radii better than models that ignore the host star, especially for highly irradiated objects. However, the measured radii of 10 objects are still inconsistent at >3 σ level, indicating residual gaps in our irradiated evolutionary model.