Related papers: Detecting Oceans on Extrasolar Planets Using the G…
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…
The vegetation's ``red edge'', an intensity bump in the Earth's spectrum near 700 $nm$ when sunlight is reflected from greenery, is often suggested as a tool in the search for life in terrestrial-like extrasolar planets. Here, through…
The visible reflectance spectrum of many solar system bodies changes with changing viewing geometry for reasons not fully understood. It is often observed to redden (increasing spectral slope) with increasing solar phase angle, an effect…
Planned astronomical observatories of the 2020s will be capable of obtaining reflected light photometry and spectroscopy of cool extrasolar giant planets. Here we explain that such data are valuable both for understanding the origin and…
A search for second-timescale optical transients is one of the frontiers of time-domain astronomy. However, it has been pointed out that reflections of sunlight from Earth-orbiting objects can also produce second-timescale ``glints.'' We…
Future direct observations of extrasolar Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone could be hampered by a worrisome source of noise, starlight-reflecting exozodiacal dust. Mid-infrared surveys are currently underway to constrain the amount…
The Rossiter-McLaughlin (RM) effect is the distortion of stellar spectral lines that occurs during eclipses or transits, due to stellar rotation. We assess the future prospects for using the RM effect to measure the alignment of planetary…
We explore the appearance of terrestrial planets in formation by studying the emergent spectra of hot molten protoplanets during their collisional formation. While such collisions are rare, the surfaces of these bodies may remain hot at…
The discovery of rings around extrasolar planets ("exorings") is one of the next breakthroughs in exoplanetary research. Previous studies have explored the feasibility of detecting exorings with present and future photometric sensitivities…
Planned missions will spatially resolve temperate terrestrial planets from their host star. Although reflected light from such a planet encodes information about its surface, it has not been shown how to establish surface characteristics of…
The next generation of ground and space-based telescopes will image habitable planets around nearby stars. A growing literature describes how to characterize such planets with spectroscopy, but less consideration has been given to the…
Space-based photometric surveys have discovered large numbers of planets transiting other stars, but these observe in a single band-pass and yield only the planet radius, orbital period, and transit duration. Information on the masses,…
Earth-like, potentially habitable exoplanets are prime targets in the search for extraterrestrial life. Information about their atmosphere and surface can be derived by analyzing light of the parent star reflected by the planet. We…
An Earth orbiting detector sensitive to gamma ray photons will see step-like occultation features in its counting rate when a gamma ray point source crosses the Earth's limb. This is due to the change in atmospheric attenuation of the gamma…
We explore the possibility that the transit signature of an Earth-size planet can be detected in spectroscopic velocity shifts via the Rossiter effect. Under optimistic but not unrealistic conditions, it should be possible to detect a large…
Can multicellular life be distinguished from single cellular life on an exoplanet? We hypothesize that abundant upright photosynthetic multicellular life (trees) will cast shadows at high sun angles that will distinguish them from single…
Refraction deflects photons that pass through atmospheres, which affects transit light curves. Refraction thus provides an avenue to probe physical properties of exoplanet atmospheres and to constrain the presence of clouds and hazes. In…
Reflection spectroscopy holds great promise for characterizing the atmospheres and surfaces of potentially habitable terrestrial exoplanets. The surface of the modern Earth exhibits a sharp albedo change near 750 nm caused by vegetation -…
Many real-world materials are characterized by a glittery appearance. Reproducing this effect in physically based renderings is a challenging problem due to its discrete nature, especially in real-time applications which require a…
Microlensing is one of the most powerful methods that can detect extrasolar planets and a future space-based survey with a high monitoring frequency is proposed to detect a large sample of Earth-mass planets. In this paper, we examine the…