Related papers: Inference of Inhomogeneous Clouds in an Exoplanet …
Kepler-7b is to date the only exoplanet for which clouds have been inferred from the optical phase curve -- from visible-wavelength whole-disk brightness measurements as a function of orbital phase. Added to this, the fact that the phase…
Motivated by the observational evidence of inhomogeneous clouds in exoplanetary atmospheres, we investigate how proposed simple cloud distributions can affect atmospheric circulations and infrared emission. We simulated temperatures and…
Hot Jupiters are expected to be dark from both observations (albedo upper limits) and theory (alkali metals and/or TiO and VO absorption). However, only a handful of hot Jupiters have been observed with high enough photometric precision at…
Optical phase curves of hot Jupiters can reveal global scattering properties. We implement a Bayesian inference framework for optical phase curves with flux contributions from: reflected light from a potentially inhomogeneous atmosphere,…
(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…
Unlike previously explored relationships between the properties of hot Jovian atmospheres, the geometric albedo and the incident stellar flux do not exhibit a clear correlation, as revealed by our re-analysis of Q0 to Q14 Kepler data. If…
We use a planetary albedo model to investigate variations in visible wavelength phase curves of exoplanets. The presence of clouds on these exoplanets significantly alters their planetary albedo spectra. We confirm that non-uniform cloud…
Optical secondary eclipse measurements made by \emph{Kepler} reveal a diverse set of geometric albedos for hot Jupiters with equilibrium temperatures between $1550-1700$ K. The presence or absence of high altitude condensates, such as…
Ultra-hot Jupiters have recently attracted interest from observers and theoreticians alike, as they provide observationally accessible test cases. We apply a hierarchical modelling approach as a virtual laboratory to study cloud formation…
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…
Kepler has detected numerous exoplanet transits by precise measurements of stellar light in a single visible-wavelength band. In addition to detection, the precise photometry provides phase curves of exoplanets, which can be used to study…
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…
Over a large range of equilibrium temperatures, clouds shape the transmission spectrum of hot Jupiter atmospheres, yet their composition remains unknown. Recent observations show that the Kepler lightcurves of some hot Jupiters are…
Phase curves and secondary eclipses of gaseous exoplanets are diagnostic of atmospheric composition and meteorology, and the long observational baseline and high photometric precision from the Kepler Mission make its dataset well-suited for…
Clouds have been shown to be present in many exoplanetary atmospheres. Cloud formation modeling predicts considerable inhomogeneities of cloud cover, consistent with optical phase curve observations. However, optical phase curves cannot…
This paper reports the detection and the measurements of occultations of the two transiting hot giant exoplanets Kepler-5b and Kepler-6b by their parent stars. The observations are obtained in the near infrared with Spitzer Space Telescope…
We present results from an atmospheric circulation study of nine hot Jupiters that comprise a large transmission spectral survey using the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes. These observations exhibit a range of spectral behavior over…
Ultra-hot Jupiters are the hottest close-in exoplanets discovered so far, and present a unique possibility to explore hot and cold chemistry on one object. The tidally locked ultra-hot Jupiter HAT-P-7b has a day/night temperature difference…
Secondary eclipse observations of several of the hottest hot Jupiters show featureless, blackbody-like spectra or molecular emission features, which are consistent with thermal inversions being present in those atmospheres. Theory predicts…
The advent of high-resolution spectroscopy as a method for exoplanet atmospheric characterization has expanded our capability to study non-transiting planets, increasing the number of planets accessible for observation. Many of the most…