Related papers: Exoplanet transits enable high-resolution spectros…
A transiting planet invites us to measure its size, mass, orbital parameters, atmospheric composition, and other characteristics. But the invitation can only be accepted if the host star is bright enough for precise measurements of its flux…
Context: Planets outside our solar system transiting their host star, i. e. those with an orbital inclination near 90 degree, are of special interest to derive physical properties of extrasolar planets. With the knowledge of the host star's…
With the rapid developments in the exoplanet field, more and more terrestrial exoplanets are being detected. Characterising their atmospheres using transit observations will become a key datum in the quest for detecting an Earth-like…
Transmission spectroscopy is among the most fruitful techniques to infer the main opacity sources present in the upper atmosphere of a transiting planet and to constrain the composition of the thermosphere and of the unbound exosphere. Not…
We re-visit the principles of transmission spectroscopy for transiting extrasolar planets, focusing on the overlap between the planetary spectrum and the illuminating stellar spectrum. Virtually all current models of exoplanetary…
In the last few years astronomical surveys have expanded the reach of planetary science into the realm of small and dense extrasolar worlds. These share a number of characteristics with the terrestrial and icy planetary objects of the Solar…
Transmission spectra of exoplanetary atmospheres have been used to infer the presence of clouds/hazes. Such inferences are typically based on spectral slopes in the optical deviant from gaseous Rayleigh scattering or low-amplitude spectral…
In the blooming field of exoplanetary science, NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has revolutionized our understanding of exoplanets. Kepler's very precise and long-duration photometry is ideal for detecting planetary transits around Sun-like…
Exoplanetary science is on the verge of an unprecedented revolution. The thousands of exoplanets discovered over the past decade have most recently been supplemented by discoveries of potentially habitable planets around nearby low-mass…
Transits of exoplanets across cool stars contain blended information about structures on the stellar surface and about the planetary body and atmosphere. To advance understanding of how this information is entangled, a surface-flux…
The primary scientific objective of this Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) Science Case Development Document (SCDD) is to measure planetary rotation rates of transiting exoplanets to determine the structure, composition, circulation, and…
In-depth studies of exoplanetary atmospheres are starting to become reality. In order to unveil their properties in detail, we need spectra with a higher S/N and also more sophisticated analysis methods. With high-resolution spectrographs,…
Exploring exoplanets has transformed our understanding of the universe by revealing many planetary systems that defy our current understanding. To study their atmospheres, spectroscopic observations are used to infer essential atmospheric…
The evolution of space technology in recent years, fueled by advancements in computing such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), has profoundly transformed our capacity to explore the cosmos. Missions like the James…
In this paper we discuss how we can read a planets spectrum to assess its habitability and search for the signatures of a biosphere. After a decade rich in giant exoplanet detections, observation techniques have now reached the ability to…
Large ground- and space-based telescopes will be able to observe Earth-like planets in the near future. We explore how different planetary surfaces can strongly influence the climate, atmospheric composition, and remotely detectable spectra…
The study of extrasolar planets has rapidly expanded to encompass the search for new planets, measurements of sizes and masses, models of planetary interiors, planetary demographics and occurrence frequencies, the characterization of…
At the dawn of the first discovery of exoplanets orbiting sun-like stars in the mid-1990s, few believed that observations of exoplanet atmospheres would ever be possible. After the 2002 Hubble Space Telescope detection of a transiting…
Due to the efforts by numerous ground-based surveys and NASA's Kepler and TESS, there will be hundreds, if not thousands, of transiting exoplanets ideal for atmospheric characterization via spectroscopy with large platforms such as JWST and…
The light curve of an exoplanetary transit can be used to estimate the planetary radius and other parameters of interest. Because accurate parameter estimation is a non-analytic and computationally intensive problem, it is often useful to…