Related papers: The Study of Climate on Alien Worlds
More than 4000 planet are known that orbit stars other than our Sun. Many harbor a dynamic atmosphere that is cold enough that cloud particles can form in abundance. The diversity of exoplanets leads to differences in cloud coverage…
The astrobiology is an interdisciplinary science, combining the methods and the means of physics, biology, chemistry and astronomy. Its main purpose is to find out if the exoplanets are habitable and if so, to confirm life on them. The…
Precise and, if possible, accurate characterization of exoplanets cannot be dissociated from the characterization of their host stars. In this chapter we discuss different methods and techniques used to derive fundamental properties and…
The discovery of an increasing number of Jupiter-like planets in orbit around other stars (or extra-solar planets) is a promising first step toward the search for Life in the Universe. We review all aspects of the question: - definition of…
The search for exoplanetary life must encompass the complex geological processes reflected in an exoplanet's atmosphere, or we risk reporting false positive and false negative detections. To do this, we must nurture the nascent discipline…
FINESSE, a NASA MIDEX mission in Step 2, would conduct a large, uniform survey of exoplanet atmospheres and create a statistically significant sample for comparative planetology. FINESSE's technical capabilities, driven by a scientific…
The simple physics of microlensing provides a well-understood tool with which to probe the atmospheres of distant stars in the Galaxy and Local Group with high magnification and resolution. Recent results in measuring stellar surface…
Astronomy provides a laboratory for extreme physics, a window into environments at extremes of distance, temperature and density that often can't be reproduced in Earth laboratories, or at least not right away. A surprising amount of the…
We review some basic issues of the life-prescribed development of the Earth's system and the Earth's atmosphere and discourse the unity of Earth's type of life in physical and transcendental divisions. In physical division, we exemplify and…
The off-site continuums are proposed for the cosmological models of the galaxies and the Universe. It is shown that many visual properties of galaxies and the Universe may be described on frames of the off-site continuums methodology. In…
Exoplanetary atmospheric retrieval refers to the inference of atmospheric properties of an exoplanet given an observed spectrum. The atmospheric properties include the chemical compositions, temperature profiles, clouds/hazes, and energy…
A variety of terrestrial planets with different physical parameters and exotic atmospheres might plausibly exist outside our Solar System, waiting to be detected by the next generation of space-exploration missions. Some of these planets…
According to the standard liquid-water definition, the Earth is only partially habitable. We reconsider planetary habitability in the framework of energy-balance models, the simplest seasonal models in physical climatology, to assess the…
A high level of diversity has already been observed among the planets of our own Solar System. As such, one expects extrasolar planets to present a wide range of distinctive features, therefore the characterisation of Earth- and super…
Exoplanets, short for `extra solar planets', are planets outside our solar system. They are objects with masses less than around 15 Jupiter-masses that orbit stars other than the Sun. They are small enough so they can not burn deuterium in…
The search for habitable exoplanets and life beyond the Solar System is one of the most compelling scientific opportunities of our time. Nevertheless, the high cost of building facilities that can address this topic and the keen public…
Exploring planetary systems similar to our solar system can provide a means to explore a large range of possibly temperate climates on Earth-like worlds. Rather than run hundreds of simulations with different eccentricities at fixed…
Stellar flares, winds and coronal mass ejections form the space weather. They are signatures of the magnetic activity of cool stars and, since activity varies with age, mass and rotation, the space weather that extra-solar planets…
A new dynamical model for the propagation of strangelets through the terrestrial atmosphere is proposed.
Whether there is a cosmic shoreline that divides terrestrial planets which have atmospheres from those that don't is one of the biggest open questions in exoplanet science. Most atmosphere searches have focused on terrestrial planets around…