Related papers: Inverting Phase Functions to Map Exoplanets

Mapping distant worlds is the next frontier for exoplanet infrared photometry studies. Ultimately, constraining spatial and temporal properties of an exoplanet atmosphere will provide further insight into its physics. For tidally-locked hot…

Short period (<50 days) low-mass (<10Mearth) exoplanets are abundant and the few of them whose radius and mass have been measured already reveal a diversity in composition. Some of these exoplanets are found on eccentric orbits and are…

The orbital sampling effect (OSE) appears in phase-folded transit light curves of extrasolar planets with moons. Analytical OSE models have hitherto neglected stellar limb darkening and non-zero transit impact parameters and assumed that…

We present modeled flux and linear polarisation signals of starlight that is reflected by spatially unresolved, horizontally inhomogeneous planets and discuss the effects of including horizontal inhomogeneities on the flux and polarisation…

Extended source effects can be seen in gravitational lensing events when sources cross critical lines. Those events probe the stellar intensity profile and could be used to measure limb darkening coefficients to test stellar model…

The most successful method used so far to search for extrasolar planets is the radial velocity technique, where periodical shifts on the measured emission from a star provide evidence for an orbiting planet. This method has been used on…

Planetary atmospheres are inherently 3D objects that can have strong gradients in latitude, longitude, and altitude. Secondary eclipse mapping is a powerful way to map the 3D distribution of the atmosphere, but the data can have large…

Eclipse mapping is a technique for inferring 2D brightness maps of transiting exoplanets from the shape of an eclipse light curve. With JWST's unmatched precision, eclipse mapping is now possible for a large number of exoplanets. However,…

Kepler-7b is to date the only exoplanet for which clouds have been inferred from the optical phase curve -- from visible-wavelength whole-disk brightness measurements as a function of orbital phase. Added to this, the fact that the phase…

A space telescope capable of high-contrast imaging has been recognized as the avenue toward finding terrestrial planets around nearby Sun-like stars and characterizing their potential habitability. It is thus essential to quantify the…

Limb-darkening is fundamental in determining transit lightcurve shapes, and is typically modeled by a variety of laws that parametrize the intensity profile of the star that is being transited. Confronted with a transit lightcurve, some…

We investigate the feasibility of reconstructing the radial intensity profile of extended stellar sources by inverting their microlensed light curves. Using a simple, linear, limb darkening law as an illustration, we show that the intensity…

The reflected light signal from a planet throughout its orbit is a powerful probe of a planet's atmospheric properties. There are a number of planets that are amenable to reflected light phase curve studies with present and future…

We derive analytic, closed form, numerically stable solutions for the total flux received from a spherical planet, moon or star during an occultation if the specific intensity map of the body is expressed as a sum of spherical harmonics.…

Direct imaging of exoplanets is crucial for advancing our understanding of planetary systems beyond our solar system, but it faces significant challenges due to the high contrast between host stars and their planets. Wavefront aberrations…

Direct imaging of exoplanets requires very high contrast levels, which are obtained using coronagraphs. But residual quasi-static aberrations create speckles in the focal plane downstream of the coronagraph which mask the planet. This…

Coronagraphy is an efficient technique for identifying and characterizing extra-solar planets orbiting in the habitable zone of their parent star. An important family of coronagraphs is based on amplitude or phase filters placed at an…

Thanks to missions like Kepler and TESS, we now have access to tens of thousands of high precision, fast cadence, and long baseline stellar photometric observations. In principle, these light curves encode a vast amount of information about…

Understanding reflectance-related quantities for worlds enables effective comparative planetology and strengthens mission planning and execution. Measurements of these properties for Earth, especially its geometric albedo and phase…

(shortened for arXiv) We aim to progress towards more efficient exoplanet detection around active stars by optimizing the use of Doppler Imaging in radial velocity measurements. We propose a simple method to simultaneously extract a…