Related papers: The Study of Climate on Alien Worlds
The search for habitable conditions and signs of life on exoplanets is a major frontier in modern astronomy. Detecting atmospheric signatures of Earth-like exoplanets is challenging due to their small sizes and relatively thin atmospheres.…
The study of the composition of brown dwarf atmospheres helped to understand their formation and evolution. Similarly, the study of exoplanet atmospheres is expected to constrain their formation and evolutionary states. We use results from…
Terrestrial planetary systems may exist around nearby stars as the Earth-sized counterparts to the many giant planets already discovered within the solar neighborhood. In this chapter we first discuss the numerous techniques which have been…
The physical principles governing the planetary atmospheres are briefly introduced in the first part of this chapter, moving from the examples of Solar System bodies. Namely, the concepts of collisional regime, balance equations,…
The climate system is a forced, dissipative, nonlinear, complex and heterogeneous system that is out of thermodynamic equilibrium. The system exhibits natural variability on many scales of motion, in time as well as space, and it is subject…
How can scientists conclude with high confidence that an exoplanet hosts life? As telescopes come on line over the next 20 years that can directly observe photons from terrestrial exoplanets, this question will dictate the activities of…
This is a broad and in places unconventional overview of the strengths and shortcomings of our standard models of fundamental physics and of cosmology. The emphasis is on ideas that have accessible experimental consequences. It becomes…
A discussion of several exotic models and how well they are able to describe the data, with particular emphasis on atmospheric neutrinos.
An increasing number of potentially habitable terrestrial planets and planet candidates are found by ongoing planet search programs. The search for atmospheric signatures to establish planetary habitability and the presence of life might be…
Models of thermal emission of neutron stars, presumably formed in their atmospheres, are needed to infer the surface temperatures, magnetic fields, chemical composition, and neutron star masses and radii from the observational data. This…
The discovery of a biosphere on another planet would transform how we view ourselves, and our planet Earth, in relation to the rest of the cosmos. We now know Earth is one planet among eight circling our sun; our sun is part of a swirling…
The review aims to give an overview of atmospheric escape processes from exoplanets. I briefly discuss the physics of various escape processes responsible for atmospheric escape across different types of exoplanets. Transmission…
More than a thousand exoplanets have been discovered over the last decade. Perhaps more excitingly, probing their atmospheres has become possible. With current data we have glimpsed the diversity of exoplanet atmospheres that will be…
In this study, we treat Earth as an exoplanet and investigate our home planet by means of a potential future mid-infrared (MIR) space mission called the Large Interferometer For Exoplanets (LIFE). We combine thermal spectra from an…
One of the promising methods to search for life on extra-solar planets (exoplanets) is to detect life's signatures in their atmospheres. Spectra of exoplanet atmospheres at the modest resolution needed to search for oxygen, carbon dioxide,…
Within the next few years, GAIA and several instruments aiming at imag- ing extrasolar planets will see first light. In parallel, low mass planets are being searched around red dwarfs which offer more favourable conditions, both for radial…
Exoplanets number in their thousands, and the number is ever increasing with the advent of new surveys and improved instrumentation. One of the most surprising things we have learnt from these discoveries is not that small-rocky planets in…
In this paper we discuss how we can read a planets spectrum to assess its habitability and search for the signatures of a biosphere. After a decade rich in giant exoplanet detections, observation techniques have now reached the ability to…
Imaging and resolved spectroscopy reveal varying environmental conditions in our dynamic solar system. Many key advances have focused on how these conditions change over time. Observatory-level commitments to conduct annual observations of…
The search for life on extrasolar planets is based on the assumption that one can screen extrasolar planets for habitability spectroscopically. The first space born instruments able to detect as well as characterize extrasolar planets,…