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The ability of a planet to maintain surface water, key to life as we know it, depends on solar and planetary energy. As a star ages, it delivers more energy to a planet. As a planet ages it produces less internal heat, which leads to…
General circulation models are a useful tool in understanding the three dimensional structure of hot Jupiter and sub-Neptune atmospheres; however, understanding the validity of the results from these simulations requires an understanding…
Planets form in discs of gas and dust around stars, and continue to grow by accretion of disc material while available. Massive planets clear a gap in their protoplanetary disc, but can still accrete gas through a circumplanetary disk. For…
Extrasolar terrestrial planets with the potential to host life might have large obliquities or be subject to strong obliquity variations. We revisit the habitability of oblique planets with an energy balance climate model (EBM) allowing for…
[Abridged] Distant stars and planets will remain spatially unresolved for the foreseeable future. It is nonetheless possible to infer aspects of their brightness markings and viewing geometries by analyzing disk-integrated rotational and…
Scattered lights from terrestrial exoplanets provide valuable information about the planetary surface. Applying the surface reconstruction method proposed by Fujii et al. (2010) to both diurnal and annual variations of the scattered light,…
There are different methods for finding exoplanets such as radial spectral shifts, astrometrical measurements, transits, timing etc. Gravitational microlensing (including pixel-lensing) is among the most promising techniques with the…
We explore the effects of seasonal variability for the climate of Earth-like planets as determined by the two parameters polar obliquity and orbital eccentricity using a general circulation model of intermediate complexity. In the first…
We consider the time-frequency analysis of a scattered light curve of a directly imaged exoplanet. We show that the geometric effect due to planetary obliquity and orbital inclination induce the frequency modulation of the apparent diurnal…
To date, a handful of exoplanets have been photometrically mapped using phase-modulated reflection or emission from their surfaces, but the small amplitudes of such signals have limited previous maps almost exclusively to coarse dipolar…
M-stars comprise 80% of main-sequence stars, and so their planetary systems provide the best chance for finding habitable planets, i.e.: those with surface liquid water. We have modelled the broadband albedo or reflectivity of water ice and…
In order to recognize a habitable exoplanet from future observed spectra, we present new model reflected spectra and geometric albedo for modern and prebiotic (3.9 Ga) Earth-like exoplanets orbiting within the habitable zone of stars of…
Inferring the climate and surface conditions of terrestrial exoplanets in the habitable zone is a major goal for the field of exoplanet science. This pursuit will require both statistical analyses of the population of habitable planets as…
Detection of the signature of Rayleigh scattering in the transmission spectrum of an exoplanet is increasingly becoming the target of observational campaigns because the spectral slope of the Rayleigh continuum enables one to determine the…
During accretion, the young rocky planets are so hot that they become endowed with a magma ocean. From that moment, the mantle convective thermal flux control the cooling of the planet and an atmosphere is created by outgassing. This…
In the search for life beyond our Solar system, attention should be focused on those planets that have the potential to maintain habitable conditions over the prolonged periods of time needed for the emergence and expansion of life as we…
A planet's albedo is a fundamental property that sets its energy budget by dictating the fraction of incident radiation absorbed versus reflected back to space. Generally, optical eclipse observations have revealed the majority of hot,…
Planets in the liquid-water habitable zone of low-mass stars experience large tidal forces, $10^3$ to $10^4$ times those on Earth, due to the small distance between the habitable zone and the host stars. Therefore, interior solid tides,…
Recently discovered exoplanets on close-in orbits should have surface temperatures of 100's to 1000's of K. They are likely tidally locked and synchronously rotating around their parent stars and, if an atmosphere is absent, have surface…
Planets and moons in our Solar System have strongly peaked reflected light phase curves at opposition. In this work, we produce a modified reflected light phase curve model and use it to fit the Cassini phase curves of Jupiter and…