Related papers: Detecting Life-bearing Extra-solar Planets with Sp…
With the ever-growing number of exoplanets detected, the issue of characterization is becoming more and more relevant. Direct imaging is certainly the most efficient but the most challenging tool to probe the atmosphere of exoplanets and…
Microlensing has proven to be a valuable tool to search for extrasolar planets of Jovian- to Super-Earth-mass planets at orbits of a few AU. Since planetary signals are of very short duration, an intense and continuous monitoring is…
Among the group of extrasolar planets, transiting planets provide a great opportunity to obtain direct measurements for the basic physical properties, such as mass and radius of these objects. These planets are therefore highly important in…
Observations of stellar surfaces - except for the Sun - are hampered by their tiny angular extent, while observed spectral lines are smeared by averaging over the stellar surface, and by stellar rotation. Exoplanet transits can be used to…
The key to understanding an extrasolar giant planet's spectrum--and hence its detectability and evolution--lies with its atmosphere. Now that direct observations of thermal emission from extrasolar giant planets are in hand, atmosphere…
We study the spectrum of a planetary atmosphere to derive detectable features in low resolution of different global geochemical cycles on exoplanets - using the sulphur cycle as our example. We derive low resolution detectable features for…
The Planetary Camera and Spectrograph (PCS) for the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) will be dedicated to detecting and characterising nearby exoplanets with sizes from sub-Neptune to Earth-size in the neighbourhood of the Sun. This goal is…
The discovery of extra-solar planets is one of the greatest achievements of modern astronomy. The detection of planets with a wide range of masses demonstrates that extra-solar planets of low mass exist. In this paper we describe a mission,…
Upcoming NASA astrophysics missions such as the James Webb Space Telescope will search for signs of life on planets transiting nearby stars. Doing so will require co-adding dozens of transmission spectra to build up sufficient signal to…
The exoplanet detection is the most exciting and challenging field of astronomy. The discovery of many exoplanets has revolutionized our understanding of the formation and evolution of planetary systems and has showed new ways to search for…
The search for extrasolar rocky planets has already found the first transiting rocky super-Earth, Corot 7b, with a surface temperature that allows for magma oceans. Here we ask if we could distinguish rocky planets with recent major…
The radius of a planet is a fundamental parameter that probes its composition and habitability. Precise radius measurements are typically derived from the fraction of starlight blocked when a planet transits its host star. The wide-field…
One of the big challenges in exoplanet science is to determine the atmospheric makeup of extrasolar planets, and to find biosignatures that hint at the existence of biochemical processes on another world. The biomarkers we are trying to…
An Earth-like extra-solar planet emits light which is many orders of magnitude fainter than that of the parent star. We propose a method of identifying bio-signature spectral lines in light from known extra-solar planets based on Fourier…
Coronagraphic imaging in combination with moderate to high spectral resolution may prove more effective in both detecting extrasolar planets and characterizing them than a standard coronagraphic imaging approach. We envisage an…
Several concepts now exist for small, space-based missions to directly characterize exoplanets in reflected light. Here, we develop an instrument noise model suitable for studying the spectral characterization potential of a…
Differential spectroscopy during exoplanet transits permits to reconstruct spectra of small stellar surface portions that successively become hidden behind the planet. The center-to-limb behavior of stellar line shapes, asymmetries and…
The first opportunity to detect indications for life outside the Solar System may be provided already within the next decade with upcoming missions such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the European Extremely Large Telescope…
The study of planets outside our solar system may lead to major advances in our understanding of the Earth, and provide insight into the universal set of rules by which planets form and evolve. To achieve these goals requires applying…
With the recent discoveries of hundreds of extrasolar planets, the search for planets like Earth and life in the universe, is quickly gaining momentum. In the future, large space observatories could directly detect the light scattered from…