Related papers: An analytical formalism accounting for clouds and …
Observations of exoplanet transit spectra are essential to understanding the physics and chemistry of distant worlds. The effects of opacity sources and many physical processes combine to set the shape of a transit spectrum. Two such key…
Refraction deflects photons that pass through atmospheres, which affects transit light curves. Refraction thus provides an avenue to probe physical properties of exoplanet atmospheres and to constrain the presence of clouds and hazes. In…
Detection of the signature of Rayleigh scattering in the transmission spectrum of an exoplanet is increasingly becoming the target of observational campaigns because the spectral slope of the Rayleigh continuum enables one to determine the…
Atmospheric refraction affects to various degrees exoplanet transit, lunar eclipse, as well as stellar occultation observations. Exoplanet retrieval algorithms often use analytical expressions for the column abundance along a ray traversing…
Most models used to predict or fit exoplanet transmission spectra do not include all the effects of atmospheric refraction. Namely, the angular size of the star with respect to the planet can limit the lowest altitude, or highest density…
Future space-based direct imaging missions will perform low-resolution (R$<$100) optical (0.3-1~$\mu$m) spectroscopy of planets, thus enabling reflected spectroscopy of cool giants. Reflected light spectroscopy is encoded with rich…
Atmospheric regions below a refractive boundary are hidden in limb observations. Refraction thus creates a gray continuum in the planet's transmission spectrum which can hide spectral features associated with sources of atmospheric opacity.…
Transmission spectroscopy of exoplanets is a tool to characterize rocky planets and explore their habitability. Using the Earth itself as a proxy, we model the atmospheric cross section as a function of wavelength, and show the effect of…
The presence of aerosols in an exoplanet atmosphere can veil the underlying material and can lead to a flat transmission spectrum during primary transit observations. In this work, we explore forward scattering effects from super-micron…
It has been posited that lunar eclipse observations may help predict the in-transit signature of Earth-like extrasolar planets. However, a comparative analysis of the two phenomena addressing in detail the transport of stellar light through…
[Abridged] The transmission of light through a planetary atmosphere can be studied as a function of altitude and wavelength using stellar or solar occultations, giving often unique constraints on the atmospheric composition. For exoplanets,…
We present an analysis on the detection viability of refraction effects in Kepler's exoplanet atmospheres using binning techniques for their light curves in order to compare against simulated refraction effects. We split the Kepler…
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…
Recent transmission spectroscopy has revealed that clouds and hazes are common in the atmospheres of close-in exoplanets. In this study, using the photochemical, microphysical, and transmission spectrum models for close-in warm ($\lesssim$…
We quantify the effects of refraction in transit transmission spectroscopy on spectral absorption features and on temporal variations that could be used to obtain altitude-dependent spectra for planets orbiting stars of different stellar…
Polarimetry is about to become a powerful tool for determining the atmospheric properties of exoplanets. To provide the basis for the interpretation of observational results and for predictive studies to guide future observations,…
We propose a method to distinguish between cloudy, hazy and clearsky (free of clouds and hazes) exoplanet atmospheres that could be applicable to upcoming large aperture space and ground-based telescopes such as the James Webb Space…
The theory of remote sensing shows that observing a planet at multiple phase angles ($\alpha$) is a powerful strategy to characterize its atmosphere. Here, we analyse how the information contained in reflected-starlight spectra of…
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…
Observations of stellar surfaces - except for the Sun - are hampered by their tiny angular extent, while observed spectral lines are smeared by averaging over the stellar surface, and by stellar rotation. Exoplanet transits can be used to…