Related papers: Inferring Planetary Obliquity Using Rotational & O…
The stellar obliquity of a planetary system is often used to help constrain the system's formation and evolution. One of the mechanisms to reorient the stellar spin involves a secular resonance crossing due to the dissipation of the…
The irradiance received by a spherical body or a planet close to a spherically symmetric source does not follow the point-sized source approximation and the inverse-square variation of irradiation if spherical symmetry is broken. In the…
With several detections, the technique of gravitational microlensing has proven useful for studying planets that orbit stars at Galactic distances, and it can even be applied to detect planets in neighbouring galaxies. So far, planet…
The holy grail of exoplanet searches is an exo-Earth, an Earth mass planet in the habitable zone around a nearby star. Mass is the most important parameter of a planet and can only be measured by observing the motion of the star around the…
A reasonable basis for future astronomical investigations of exoplanets lies in our best knowledge of the planets and satellites in the Solar System. Solar System bodies exhibit a wide variety of surface environments, even including…
The phase or orbital light curves of extrasolar terrestrial planets in reflected or emitted light will contain information about their atmospheres and surfaces complementary to data obtained by other techniques such as spectrosopy. We show…
The tilt of a planet's spin axis off its orbital axis ("obliquity") is a basic physical characteristic that plays a central role in determining the planet's global circulation and energy redistribution. Moreover, recent studies have also…
Gravitational lensing events provide unique opportunities to discover and study planetary systems and binaries. Here we build on previous work to explore the role that orbital motion can play in both identifying and learning more about…
The Earth's obliquity is stabilized by the Moon, which facilitates a rapid precession of the Earth's spin-axis, de-tuning the system away from resonance with orbital modulation. It is however, likely that the architecture of the Solar…
Main-sequence stars earlier than spectral type ~F6 or so are expected to rotate rapidly due to their radiative exteriors. This rapid rotation leads to an oblate stellar figure. It also induces the photosphere to be hotter (by up to several…
Studying the albedos of the planets and moons of the Solar System dates back at least a century. Of particular interest is the relationship between the albedo measured at superior conjunction, known as the ``geometric albedo", and the…
(Abridged) The solar system gas giant planets are oblate due to their rapid rotation. A measurement of the planet's projected oblateness would constrain the planet's rotational period. Planets that are synchronously rotating with their…
Exoplanet discoveries over recent years have shown that terrestrial planets are exceptionally common. Many of these planets are in compact systems that result in complex orbital dynamics. A key step toward determining the surface conditions…
A crucial diagnostic that can tell us about processes involved in the formation and dynamical evolutionof planetary systems is the angle between the rotation axis of a star and a planet's orbital angular momentum vector ("spin-orbit"…
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,…
Imaging of planets is very difficult, due to the glare from their nearby, much brighter suns. Static and slowly-evolving aberrations are the limiting factors, even after application of adaptive optics. The residual speckle pattern is highly…
In the near-future, dedicated telescopes observe Earth-like exoplanets in reflected light, allowing their characterization. Because of the huge distances, every exoplanet will be a single pixel, but temporal variations in its spectral flux…
The insolation a planet receives from its parent star is the main driver of the climate and depends on the planet's orbital configuration. Planets with non-zero obliquity and eccentricity experience seasonal insolation variations. As a…
The obliquities of planet-hosting stars are clues about the formation of planetary systems. Previous observations led to the hypothesis that for close-in giant planets, spin-orbit alignment is enforced by tidal interactions. Here, we…
Thermal light-curve analysis is a powerful approach to probe the thermal structures of exoplanetary atmospheres, which are greatly influenced by the planetary obliquity and eccentricity. Here we investigate the thermal light curves of…