Related papers: Pluto's atmosphere from stellar occultations in 20…
Over the last decade, precise exoplanet transmission spectroscopy has revealed the atmospheres of dozens of exoplanets, driven largely by observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope. One major discovery has been the ubiquity of…
The New Horizons spacecraft will achieve a wide range of measurement objectives at the Pluto system, including color and panchromatic maps, 1.25-2.50 micron spectral images for studying surface compositions, and measurements of Pluto's…
Kepler-13Ab (= KOI-13.01) is a unique transiting hot Jupiter. It is one of very few known short-period planets orbiting a hot A-type star, making it one of the hottest planets currently known. The availability of Kepler data allows us to…
A minimum atmospheric temperature, or tropopause, occurs at a pressure of around 0.1 bar in the atmospheres of Earth, Titan, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, despite great differences in atmospheric composition, gravity, internal heat…
With high-resolution spectroscopy we can study exoplanet atmospheres and learn about their chemical composition, temperature profiles, and presence of clouds and winds, mainly in hot, giant planets. State-of-the-art instrumentation is…
The New Horizons spacecraft, which flew by Pluto on July 14, 2015, revealed the presence of haze in Pluto's atmosphere that were formed by CH4/N2 photochemistry at high altitudes in Pluto's atmosphere, as on Titan and Triton. In order to…
Context: When the planet transits its host star, it is possible to measure the planetary radius and (with radial velocity data) the planet mass. For the study of planetary atmospheres, it is essential to obtain transit and occultation…
The chemical composition of warm gas giant exoplanet atmospheres (with Teq < 1000 K) is not well known due to the lack of observational constraints. HAT-P-12 b is a warm, sub-Saturn-mass transiting exoplanet that is ideal for transmission…
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…
The intriguing circumpolar cyclone pattern at Jupiter's poles raises fundamental questions about how these systems are organized vertically and, further, how the planet's internal heat shapes and sustains them in the absence of solar…
We highlight the importance of gaseous TiO and VO opacity on the highly irradiated close-in giant planets. The atmospheres of these planets naturally fall into two classes that are somewhat analogous to the M- and L-type dwarfs. Those that…
A combined fluid/kinetic model is developed to calculate thermally driven escape of N2 from Pluto's atmosphere for two solar heating conditions: no heating above 1450 km and solar minimum heating conditions. In the combined model,…
The best-characterized exoplanets to date are planets on close-in transiting orbits around their host stars. The high level of irradiation and transiting geometry of these objects make them ideal targets for atmospheric investigations.…
We present results of simulations of the climate of the newly discovered planet Proxima Centauri B, performed using the Met Office Unified Model (UM). We examine the responses of both an `Earth-like' atmosphere and simplified nitrogen and…
In this work we present the results of a spectral observing campaign of Pluto to search for temporal changes in surface composition on 1- to 3-year timescales. Near-infrared spectra of Pluto were obtained from June 2014 to August 2017 with…
We present a computationally efficient 1-D seasonal radiative model, with convective adjustment, of Jupiter's atmosphere. Our model takes into account radiative forcings from the main hydrocarbons (methane, ethane, acetylene), ammonia,…
In this letter we explore the environment of Pluto and Charon in the far infrared with the main aim to identify the signs of any possible dust ring, should it exist in the system. Our study is based on observations performed at 70 um with…
We present results from three world-wide campaigns that resulted in the detections of two single-chord and one multi-chord stellar occultations by the Plutino object (84922) 2003~VS$_2$. From the single-chord occultations in 2013 and 2014…
We present new methodological features and physical ingredients included in the 1D radiative transfer code HELIOS, improving the hemispheric two-stream formalism. We conduct a thorough intercomparison survey with several established forward…
N2 is abundant in Pluto's atmosphere and on its surface, but the supply is depleted by prodigious atmospheric escape. We demonstrate that cometary impacts could not have delivered enough N mass to resupply Pluto's N2 atmospheric escape over…