Related papers: Inferring asymmetric limb cloudiness on exoplanets…
Rotational mapping and glint are two proposed methods to directly detect liquid water on the surface of habitable exoplanets. However, false positives for both methods may prevent the unambiguous detection of exoplanet oceans. We use…
Planets can emit polarized thermal radiation, just like brown dwarfs. We present calculated thermal polarization signals from hot exoplanets, using an advanced radiative transfer code that fully includes all orders of scattering by gaseous…
Transit timing variations - deviations from strict periodicity between successive passages of a transiting planet - can be used to probe the structure and dynamics of multiple-planet systems. In this paper, we examine prospects for…
This paper describes a simple activity for plotting and characterizing the light curve from an exoplanet transit event by way of differential photometry analysis. Using free digital imaging software, participants analyse a series of…
Context. The Kepler object KIC 12557548 b is peculiar. It exhibits transit-like features every 15.7 hours that vary in depth between 0.2% and 1.2%. Rappaport et al. (2012) explain the observations in terms of a disintegrating, rocky planet…
Planets embedded within debris disks gravitationally perturb nearby dust and can create clumpy, azimuthally asymmetric circumstellar ring structures that rotate in lock with the planet. The Earth creates one such structure in the solar…
At optical wavelengths, Titan's brightness for large Sun-Titan-observer phase angles significantly exceeds its dayside brightness. The brightening that occurs near back-illumination is due to moderately large haze particles in the moon's…
Despite the ever-growing number of exoplanets discovered and the extensive analyses carried out to find their potential satellites, only two exomoon candidates, Kepler-1625b-i and Kepler-1708 b-i, have been discovered to date. A…
Basic atmospheric properties such as albedo and heat redistribution between day and nightside have been inferred for a number of planets using observations of secondary eclipses and thermal phase curves. Optical phase curves have not yet…
The direct detection of new extrasolar planets from high-precision photometry data is commonly based on the observation of the transit signal of the planet as it passes in front of its star. Close-in planets, however, leave additional…
Transmission spectroscopy provides a window to study exoplanetary atmospheres, but that window is fogged by clouds and hazes. Clouds and haze introduce a degeneracy between the strength of gaseous absorption features and planetary physical…
Understanding of clouds is instrumental in interpreting current and future spectroscopic observations of exoplanets. Modelling clouds consistently is complex, since it involves many facets of chemistry, nucleation theory, condensation…
Clouds are ubiquitous in extrasolar planet atmospheres and are critical to our understanding of planetary climate and chemistry. They also represent one of the greater challenges to overcome when trying to interpret transit transmission…
NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has successfully discovered thousands of exoplanet candidates using the transit method, including hundreds of stars with multiple transiting planets. In order to estimate the frequency of these valuable…
Before an exoplanet transit, atmospheric refraction bends light into the line of sight of an observer. The refracted light forms a stellar mirage, a distorted secondary image of the host star. I model this phenomenon and the resultant…
The Kepler mission has made an important observation, the first detection of photons from a terrestrial planet by observing its phase curve (Kepler-10b). This opens a new field in exoplanet science: the possibility to get information about…
(Abridged) Space missions to search for exo-planets via the transit method, such as COROT, Eddington and Kepler, will need to address problems associated with the automated and efficient detection of planetary transits in light curves…
Differential spectroscopy during exoplanet transits permits to reconstruct spectra of small stellar surface portions that successively become hidden behind the planet. The center-to-limb behavior of stellar line shapes, asymmetries and…
Space-based photometric surveys have discovered large numbers of planets transiting other stars, but these observe in a single band-pass and yield only the planet radius, orbital period, and transit duration. Information on the masses,…
The radial velocity technique is currently used to classify transiting objects. While capable of identifying grazing binary eclipses, this technique cannot reliably identify blends, a chance overlap of a faint background eclipsing binary…