Condensation Clouds in Substellar Atmospheres with Virga

Natasha E. Batalha*, Caoimhe M. Rooney, Channon Visscher, Sarah E. Moran, Mark S. Marley, Aditya R. Sengupta, Sven Kiefer, Matt G. Lodge, James Mang, Caroline V. Morley, Sagnick Mukherjee, Jonathan J. Fortney, Peter Gao, Nikole K. Lewis, L. C. Mayorga, Logan A. Pearce, Hannah R. Wakeford

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticle (Academic Journal)peer-review

Abstract

Here we present an open-source cloud model for substellar atmospheres, called Virga. The Virga-v0 series has already been widely adopted in the literature. It is written in Python and has heritage from the A. S. Ackerman & M. S. Marley model (often referred to as eddysed), used to study clouds on both exoplanets and brown dwarfs. In the development of the official Virga-v1 we have retained all the original functionality of eddysed and updated/expanded several components, including the back-end optical constant data, calculations of the Mie properties, available condensate species, saturation vapor pressure curves, and formalism for fall speed calculations. Here we benchmark Virga by reproducing key results in the literature, including the SiO2 cloud detection in WASP-17 b and the brown dwarf Sonora Diamondback model series. Development of Virga is ongoing, with future versions already planned and ready for release. We encourage community feedback and collaborations within the GitHub code repository.
Original languageEnglish
Number of pages17
JournalThe Astronomical Journal
Volume171
Issue number2
Early online date19 Jan 2026
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2 Feb 2026

Bibliographical note

©2026.TheAuthor(s).

Keywords

  • Exoplanet atmospheres
  • Brown dwarfs
  • Atmospheric clouds

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