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The study of exoplanetary atmospheres is key to understand the differences between their physical, chemical and dynamical processes. Up to now, the bulk of atmospheric characterization analysis has been conducted on transiting planets. On…
We have investigated the information content in reflected-starlight spectra of exoplanets. We specify our analysis to Barnard's Star b candidate super-Earth, for which we assume a radius 0.6 times that of Neptune, an atmosphere dominated by…
The atmosphere of the exoplanet HD 209458b is undergoing sustained mass loss, believed to be caused by X-ray and extreme-ultraviolet (XUV) irradiation from its star. The majority of this flux is not directly observable due to interstellar…
Motivated by a high Spitzer IRAC oversubscription rate, we present a new technique of randomly and sparsely sampling phase curves of hot Jupiters. Snapshot phase curves are enabled by technical advances in precision pointing as well as…
The detection and characterization of potentially habitable exoplanets is one of the chief goals of astrophysics for the coming decades. Imaging in reflected light is well suited for characterizing Earth-like planets, as much can be learned…
The sky-averaged (global) highly redshifted 21-cm spectrum from neutral hydrogen is expected to appear in the VHF range of $\sim20-200$ MHz and its spectral shape and strength are determined by the heating properties of the first stars and…
In the past few years, the study of exoplanets has evolved from being pure discovery, then being more exploratory in nature and finally becoming very quantitative. In particular, transmission spectroscopy now allows the study of…
We report transmission spectroscopy of the bloated hot Jupiter WASP-74b in the wavelength range from 4000 to 6200 \r{A}. We observe two transit events with the Very Large Telescope FOcal Reducer and Spectrograph (VLT FORS2) and present a…
A key goal of exoplanet spectroscopy is to measure atmospheric properties, such as abundances of chemical species, in order to connect them to our understanding of atmospheric physics and planet formation. In this new era of high-quality…
Thermal phase variations of short period planets indicate that they are not spherical cows: day-to-night temperature contrasts range from hundreds to thousands of degrees, rivaling their vertical temperature contrasts. Nonetheless, the…
Accurate estimations of atmospheric properties of exoplanets from transmission spectra require understanding of degeneracies between model parameters and observations that can resolve them. We conduct a systematic investigation of such…
We report infrared photometry of the extrasolar planet HD 209458b during the time of secondary eclipse (planet passing behind the star). Observations were acquired during two secondary eclipses at the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF)…
Clouds and other features in exoplanet and brown dwarf atmospheres cause variations in brightness as they rotate in and out of view. Ground-based instruments reach the high contrasts and small inner working angles needed to monitor these…
We have measured the dayside spectrum of HD 189733b between 1.5 and 2.5 microns using the NICMOS instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope. The emergent spectrum contains significant modulation, which we attribute to the presence of…
Here we explore the capabilities of NASA's 3.0 meter Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) and SpeX spectrometer and the 5.08 meter Hale telescope with the TripleSpec spectrometer with near-infrared H, K, and L-band measurements of HD…
The HST/NICMOS transmission spectrum measurements of HD 189733b that suggest the detection of methane (CH$_{4}$) in an exoplanet atmosphere have been a source of significant controversy. With what is probably the best analyzed exoplanet…
We present thermal phase curve measurements for the hot Jupiter WASP-103b observed with Hubble/WFC3 and Spitzer/IRAC. The phase curves have large amplitudes and negligible hotspot offsets, indicative of poor heat redistribution to the…
Transmission spectroscopy has proven to be an effective technique for characterizing exoplanet atmospheres. However, transmission spectroscopy requires planetary transits, which occur for only a small fraction of planetary systems due to…
The search for exoplanets is an active field in astronomy, with direct imaging as one of the most challenging methods due to faint exoplanet signals buried within stronger residual starlight. Successful detection requires advanced image…
Atmospheric characterization of exoplanets using ground-based high-resolution transmission spectroscopy has traditionally focussed on large and close-in planets, such as hot Jupiters. In this work, we aim to extend this technique to smaller…