Related papers: Probing exoplanet clouds with optical phase curves
Future telescopes will characterize rocky exoplanets in reflected light, revealing their albedo, which depends on surface, cloud, and atmospheric properties. Identifying these features is crucial for assessing habitability. We present…
The size distribution and total mass of objects in the Oort Cloud have important implications to the theory of planets formation, including the properties of, and the processes taking place in the early solar system. We discuss the…
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…
Results from the Kepler mission indicate that the occurrence rate of small planets ($<3$ $R_\oplus$) in the habitable zone of nearby low-mass stars may be as high as 80%. Despite this abundance, probing the conditions and atmospheric…
We observed two full orbital phase curves of the transiting brown dwarf KELT-1b, at 3.6um and 4.5um, using the Spitzer Space Telescope. Combined with previous eclipse data from Beatty et al. (2014), we strongly detect KELT-1b's phase…
We show that the gas giant exoplanet HD 189733b is less oblate than Saturn, based on Spitzer Space Telescope photometry of seven transits. The observable manifestations of oblatenesswould have been slight anomalies during the ingress and…
Never before has the detection and characterization of exoplanets via transit photometry been as promising and feasible as it is now, due to the increasing breadth and sensitivity of time domain optical surveys. Past works have made use of…
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…
Direct-imaging spectra hold rich information about a planet's atmosphere and surface, and several space-based missions aiming at such observations will become a reality in the near future. Previous spectral retrieval works have resulted in…
In favourable conditions, the density of transiting planets in multiple systems can be determined from photometry data alone. Dynamical information can be extracted from light curves, providing modelling is done self-consistently, i.e.…
We present a multiple scattering vector radiative transfer model which produces disk integrated, full phase polarized light curves for reflected light from an exoplanetary atmosphere. We validate our model against results from published…
With the increasing number of directly imaged giant exoplanets the current atmosphere models are often not capable of fully explaining the spectra and luminosity of the sources. A particularly challenging component of the atmosphere models…
The extreme environments of transiting close-in exoplanets in highly-eccentric orbits are ideal for testing exo-climate physics. Spectroscopically resolved phase curves not only allow for the characterization of their thermal response to…
Evaporating rocky exoplanets, such as KIC 12557548b, eject large amounts of dust grains, which can trail the planet in a comet-like tail. When such objects occult their host star, the resulting transit signal contains information about the…
We present the characterization of the Kepler-93 exoplanetary system, based on three years of photometry gathered by the Kepler spacecraft. The duration and cadence of the Kepler observations, in tandem with the brightness of the star,…
We have investigated the information content in reflected-starlight spectra of exoplanets. We specify our analysis to Barnard's Star b candidate super-Earth, for which we assume a radius 0.6 times that of Neptune, an atmosphere dominated by…
The mutual orbital alignment in multiple planetary systems is an important parameter for understanding their formation. There are a number of elaborate techniques to determine the alignment parameters using photometric or spectroscopic…
Kepler-78b is a transiting Earth-mass planet in an 8.5 hr orbit discovered by the Kepler Space Mission. We performed an analysis of the published radial velocity measurements for Kepler-78 in order to derive a refined measurement for the…
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 develop an inversion technique of annual scattered light curves to sketch a two-dimensional albedo map of exoplanets in face-on orbits. As a test-bed for future observations of extrasolar terrestrial planets, we apply this mapping…