Related papers: Optical properties of potential condensates in exo…
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…
We investigated the impact of selected cloud condensates in exoplanetary atmospheres on the polarization of scattered stellar radiation. We considered a selection of 25 cloud condensates that are expected to be present in extrasolar…
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…
The investigation of the atmospheres of closely separated, directly imaged gas giant exoplanets is challenging due to the presence of stellar speckles that pollute their spectrum. To remedy this, the analysis of medium- to high-resolution…
Future direct-imaging exoplanet missions such as WFIRST/AFTA, Exo-C, and Exo-S will measure the reflectivity of exoplanets at visible wavelengths. The exoplanets to be observed will be located further away from their parent stars than is…
The unprecedented wavelength coverage and sensitivity of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) permits to measure the absorption features of a wide range of condensate species from Silicates to Titan tholins. Atmospheric retrievals are…
With a new generation of observatories coming online this decade, the process of characterizing exoplanet atmospheres will need to be reinvented. Currently mostly on the instrumental side, characterization bottlenecks will soon stand by the…
A space telescope capable of high-contrast imaging has been recognized as the avenue toward finding terrestrial planets around nearby Sun-like stars and characterizing their potential habitability. It is thus essential to quantify the…
Polarized scattering in planetary atmospheres is computed in the context of exoplanets. The problem of polarized radiative transfer is solved for a general case of absorption and scattering, while Rayleigh and Mie polarized scattering are…
Direct imaging of widely separated exoplanets from space will obtain their reflected light spectra and measure their atmospheric properties, and small and temperate planets will be the focus of the next generation telescopes. In this work,…
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…
Laboratory results of the optical properties of vapor-deposited water ice, specifically the refractive index and extinction coefficient, are available mainly for a selective set of wavelengths and a limited number of deposition…
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.…
We describe the Cool Opacity-sampling Dynamic EXtended (CODEX) atmosphere models of Mira variable stars, and examine in detail the physical and numerical approximations that go in to the model creation. The CODEX atmospheric models are…
Direct imaging of widely separated exoplanets from space will obtain their reflected light spectra and measure atmospheric properties. Previous calculations have shown that a change in the orbital phase would cause a spectral signal, but…
We study the extinction efficiencies as well as scattering properties of particles of different porosity. Calculations are performed for porous pseudospheres with small size (Rayleigh) inclusions using the discrete dipole approximation.…
Optical phase curves have become one of the common probes of exoplanetary atmospheres, but the information they encode has not been fully elucidated. Building on a diverse body of work, we upgrade the Flexible Modeling System (FMS) to…
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…
Exoplanet atmospheric retrieval is a computational technique widely used to infer properties of planetary atmospheres from remote spectroscopic observations. Retrieval codes typically employ Bayesian sampling algorithms or machine learning…
The high-contrast imaging technique is meant to provide insight into those planets orbiting several astronomical units from their host star. Space missions such as WFIRST, HabEx, and LUVOIR will measure reflected light spectra of cold…