Related papers: Giant Planet Observations with the James Webb Spac…
The planned launch of the James Webb Space Telescope in 2018 will herald a new era of exoplanet spectroscopy. JWST will be the first telescope sensitive enough to potentially characterize terrestrial planets from their transmission spectra.…
Planets may be rotationally flattened, and their oblateness thus provide useful information on their formation and evolution. Here we develop a new algorithm that can compute the transit light curve due to an oblate planet very efficiently…
High contrast imaging can find and characterize gas giant planets around nearby young stars and the closest M stars, complementing radial velocity and astrometric searches by exploring orbital separations inaccessible to indirect methods.…
We review the interior structure and evolution of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and extrasolar giant planets with particular emphasis on constraining their global composition.
Remote sensing observations suffer significant limitations when used to study the bulk atmospheric composition of the giant planets of our solar system. This impacts our knowledge of the formation of these planets and the physics of their…
Exoplanetary science has reached a historic moment. The James Webb Space Telescope will be capable of probing the atmospheres of rocky planets, and perhaps even search for biologically produced gases. However this is contingent on…
Seismology applied to giant planets could drastically change our understanding of their deep interiors, as it has happened with the Earth, the Sun, and many main-sequence and evolved stars. The study of giant planets' composition is…
Eclipse exoplanet spectroscopy has yielded detection of H_2O, CH_4, CO_2 and CO in the atmosphere of hot jupiters and neptunes. About 40 large terrestrial planets are announced or confirmed, two of which are transiting, and another deemed…
We present a community-led assessment of the solar system investigations achievable with NASA's next-generation space telescope, the Wide Field InfraRed Survey Telescope (WFIRST). WFIRST will provide imaging, spectroscopic, and…
We summarize the design and performance of the James Webb Space Telescope that is to be launched to an L2 orbit in 2011, and how it is designed, in particular, to study the epochs of First Light, Reionization and Galaxy Assembly.
The long-anticipated James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be able to directly detect large samples of galaxies at very high redshift. Using the well-established, computationally efficient Santa Cruz semi-analytic model, with recently…
The recent discovery of three Earth-sized, potentially habitable planets around a nearby cool star, TRAPPIST-1, has provided three key targets for the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Depending on their atmospheric…
The direct characterization of exoplanetary systems with high contrast imaging is among the highest priorities for the broader exoplanet community. As large space missions will be necessary for detecting and characterizing exo-Earth twins,…
One of the primary goals for the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is to observe the first galaxies. Predictions for planned and proposed surveys have typically focused on average galaxy counts, assuming a random distribution of…
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is nearing its launch date of 2018, and will undoubtedly revolutionize our knowledge of exoplanet atmospheres. While several studies have explored what the limits of the telescope will be in terms of…
We demonstrate that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can detect infrared (IR) excess from the blended light spectral energy distribution of spatially unresolved terrestrial exoplanets orbiting nearby white dwarfs. We find that JWST is…
We propose the use of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in simultaneous observations with an Earth-based telescope for parallax measurements to tightly constrain the orbital trajectory of hazardous near-Earth objects (NEOs). We…
Two groundbreaking new facilities will commence operations early in the 2020s and thereafter define much of the broad landscape of US optical-infrared astronomy in the remaining decade. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), perched…
We present a coordinated campaign of observations to monitor the brightness of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as it travels toward the second Earth-Sun Lagrange point and unfolds using the network ofUnistellar digital telescopes.…
We present a new analysis of the potential power of deep, near-infrared, imaging surveys with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to improve our knowledge of galaxy evolution. In this work we properly simulate what can be achieved with…