Related papers: Haze at Occator crater on dwarf planet Ceres
Previous observations suggested that Ceres has active but possibly sporadic water outgassing, and possibly varying spectral characteristics in a time scale of months. We used all available data of Ceres collected in the past three decades…
Bright features have been recently discovered by Dawn on Ceres, which extend previous photometric and Space Telescope observations. These features should produce distortions of the line profiles of the reflected solar spectrum and therefore…
We present a global spectrophotometric characterization of the Ceres surface using Dawn Framing Camera (FC) images. We identify the photometric model that yields the best results for photometrically correcting images. Corrected FC images…
The dwarf planet Ceres is likely differentiated similar to the terrestrial planets but with a water/ice dominated mantle and an aqueously altered crust. Detailed modeling of Ceres' phase function has never been performed to understand its…
Variations and spatial distributions of bright and dark material on dwarf planet Ceres play a key role in understanding the processes that have led to its present surface composition. We define limits for bright and dark material in order…
We study the surface of Ceres at visible wavelengths, as observed by the Visible and InfraRed mapping spectrometer (VIR) onboard the Dawn spacecraft, and analyze the variations of various spectral parameters across the whole surface. We…
Among surprising results of NASA's Dawn spacecraft mission at dwarf planet Ceres are enigmatic bright spots inside Occator crater and a lone tall pyramid mountain. Here we explain the appearance of such spots, weird mountains, and…
The surface reflectance of planetary regoliths may increase dramatically towards zero phase angle, a phenomenon known as the opposition effect (OE). Two physical processes that are thought to be the dominant contributors to the brightness…
Bright deposits in permanently shadowed craters on Ceres are thought to harbor water ice. However, the evidence for water ice presented thus far is indirect. We aim to directly detect the spectral characteristics of water ice in bright…
Context: The dwarf planet (1) Ceres - next target of the NASA Dawn mission - is the largest body in the asteroid main belt; although several observations of this body have been performed so far, the presence of surface water ice is still…
Photochemical hazes have been frequently used to interpret exoplanet transmission spectra that show an upward slope towards shorter wavelengths and weak molecular features. While previous studies have only considered spherical haze…
We study the spectrophotometric properties of dwarf planet Ceres in the VIS-IR spectral range by means of hyper-spectral images acquired by the VIR imaging spectrometer on board the NASA Dawn mission. Disk-resolved observations with a phase…
Hazes are common in known planet atmospheres, and geochemical evidence suggests early Earth occasionally supported an organic haze with significant environmental and spectral consequences. The UV spectrum of the parent star drives organic…
Photochemical hazes are important opacity sources in temperate exoplanet atmospheres, hindering current observations from characterizing exoplanet atmospheric compositions. The haziness of an atmosphere is determined by the balance between…
We observed Ceres at three epochs in 2015 November and 2017 September and October with ALMA 12-meter array and in 2017 October with the ALMA Compact Array (ACA), all at ~265 GHz continuum (wavelengths of ~1.1 mm) to map the temperatures of…
Haze in Pluto's atmosphere was detected in images by both the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) and the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) on New Horizons. LORRI observed haze up to altitudes of at least 200 km above Pluto's…
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…
Photochemical hazes are expected to form in hot Jupiter atmospheres and may explain the strong scattering slopes and muted spectral features observed in the transmission spectra of many hot Jupiters. Absorption and scattering by…
Temperate sub-Neptune exoplanets could contain large inventories of water in various phases, such as water-worlds with water-rich atmospheres or even oceans. Both space-based and ground-based observations have shown that many exoplanets…
[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,…