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Observations of transiting hot Jupiters have revealed a mismatch between the values of the Bond versus geometric albedos. In the planetary science literature, the ratio of these quantities is known as the phase integral. It has been…
(abridged) We identify 3 Kepler transiting planets, Kepler-7b, Kepler-12b, and Kepler-41b, whose orbital phase-folded light curves are dominated by planetary atmospheric processes including thermal emission and reflected light, while the…
Optical phase curves have become one of the common probes of exoplanetary atmospheres, but the information they encode has not been fully elucidated. Building on a diverse body of work, we upgrade the Flexible Modeling System (FMS) to…
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…
We investigate the geometric albedos of hot Jupiters by comparing observational data from space telescopes TESS, Kepler, CoRoT, and CHEOPS against theoretical models. The study aims to understand the distribution of observed geometric…
Reflected light curves observed for exoplanets indicate bright clouds at some of them. We estimate how the light curve and total stellar heating of a planet depend on forward and backward scattering in the clouds based on Pioneer and…
Clouds have an important role in the atmospheres of planetary bodies. It is expected that, like all the planetary bodies in our solar system, exoplanet atmospheres will also have substantial cloud coverage, and evidence is mounting for…
Atmospheres regulate the planetary heat loss and therefore influence planetary thermal evolution. Uncertainty in a giant planet's thermal state contributes to the uncertainty in the inferred abundance of heavy elements it contains. Within…
One significant difference between the atmospheres of stars and exoplanets is the presence of condensed particles (clouds or hazes) in the atmosphere of the latter. The main goal of this paper is to develop a self-consistent microphysical…
We present an analysis on the detection viability of refraction effects in Kepler's exoplanet atmospheres using binning techniques for their light curves in order to compare against simulated refraction effects. We split the Kepler…
By radiation transfer models with a realistic power spectra of the projected density distributions, we show that the optical properties of grains are poorly constrained by observations of reflection nebulae. The ISM is known to be…
Exoplanet research focusing on the characterization of super-Earths is currently limited to those handful targets orbiting bright stars that are amenable to detailed study. This Letter proposes to look at alternative avenues to probe the…
One of the most outstanding issues in exoplanet characterization is understanding the prevalence of obscuring clouds and hazes in their atmospheres. The ability to predict the presence of clouds/hazes a priori is an important goal when…
The atmospheres of extrasolar giant planets are modeled with various effective temperatures and gravities, with and without clouds. Bond albedos are computed by calculating the ratio of the flux reflected by a planet (integrated over…
We develop atmosphere models of two of the three Kepler-field planets that were known prior to the start of the Kepler mission (HAT-P-7b and TrES-2). We find that published Kepler and Spitzer data for HAT-P-7b appear to require an extremely…
We present a new two-dimensional, bin-scheme microphysical model of cloud formation in the atmospheres of hot Jupiters that includes the effects of longitudinal gas and cloud transport. We predict cloud particle size distributions as a…
The characterization of planetary atmospheres is a daunting task, pushing current observing facilities to their limits. The next generation of high-resolution spectrographs mounted on large telescopes -- such as ESPRESSO@VLT and HIRES@ELT…
In recent years, it has become clear that a substantial fraction of transiting exoplanets have some form of aerosol present in their atmospheres. Transit spectroscopy - mostly of hot Jupiters, but also of some smaller planets - has provided…
Using a general circulation model (GCM), we investigate trends in simulated hot Jupiter atmospheres for a range of irradiation temperatures (1,500 - 4,000 K), surface gravities (10 and 40 m s-2), and cloud conditions. Our models include…
Diagnostic potential of the spectral signatures of Raman scattering imprinted in planetary albedo spectra at short optical wavelengths has been demonstrated in research on Solar System planets and has recently been proposed as a probe of…