The main purpose of this study is to gather information about the stability of Super Earths atmospheres. Super Earths are likely to exist in a various range of atmospheres; therefore, it's important to understand which ones allow liquid water on the surface and could potentially host Earth-like life forms. In order to do so, a numerical code needs to be developed while trying to include those chemical and physical processes that are believed to be present in a typical atmosphere.
Once determined the best chemical environments for life survival on a Super Earth, these atmospheric conditions (pressure, temperature, and chemical composition) could be reproduced in laboratory. Following the idea proposed by Claudi et al. (2016) within the "Atmosphere in a Test Tube" experiment, these mixtures could be inserted in a special steel cylinder that contains photosynthetic bacteria: irradiating the chamber, one should be able to study how these species behave and how they effectively change the atmosphere during time, mainly producing oxygen. The setup includes a light source able to reproduce visible and NIR spectra of G, K, and M stars. The experiment is already running with Earth-Sun and Earth-M star simulations, producing many interesting results.
The proposed work is part of a project that aims to define a database of exoplanets' synthetic spectra in order to understand observational data that will be retrieved from Cheops, PLATO, JWST and ARIEL.