Hayley Beltz, PhD

I am currently a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Maryland, College Park. My work focuses looking at hot and ultrahot Jupiter atmospheres with three-dimensional atmospheric models and exploring how magnetic effects might change circulation. I’m also very passionate about DEI and anti-racism in academia.

Ultrahot Jupiters and Kinematic MHD: Effects on Circulation

This work represents the first time our kinematic MHD approach was applied to an ultrahot Jupiter GCM. For our kinematic MHD models, we see the emergence of a magnetic circulation regime in the upper atmosphere consisting of wind flowing up and over the poles (as opposed to eastward flow). This results in stronger day-night temperature gradients and reduced hotspot offsets.

Ultrahot Jupiters and High-Resolution Transmission Spectra

In this work, I explore how our kinematic MHD approach affects high resolution transmission spectra at various wavelengths. As seen on the right, the line of sight velocity structures differ between each model. This results in different net Doppler shifts as a function of phase, with the active drag model showing trends not produced by the drag-free and uniform drag models.

Ultrahot Jupiters and High-Resolution Emission Spectra

For this paper, I investigated how high resolution emission spectra is affected by our kinematic MHD approach. As shown in the video to the left, the emission spectra changes strongly as a function of phase showing emission and absorption features throughout its orbit. Near the quadratures, emission and absorption features (with different Doppler shifts) can be seen at the time. In addition, the net Doppler shift patterns for our active drag case differ compared to that of the drag-free and uniform drag.