Related papers: Analytic Scattering and Refraction Models for Exop…
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…
Planned missions will spatially resolve temperate terrestrial planets from their host star. Although reflected light from such a planet encodes information about its surface, it has not been shown how to establish surface characteristics of…
Currently, the analysis of transmission spectra is the most successful technique to probe the chemical composition of exoplanet atmospheres. But the accuracy of these measurements is constrained by observational limitations and the…
Although transit spectroscopy is a powerful method for studying the composition, thermal properties and dynamics of exoplanet atmospheres, only a few transiting terrestrial exoplanets will be close enough to allow significant transit…
Accurate estimations of atmospheric properties of exoplanets from transmission spectra require understanding of degeneracies between model parameters and observations that can resolve them. We conduct a systematic investigation of such…
The polarization state of starlight reflected by a planetary atmosphere uniquely reveals coverage, particle size, and composition of aerosols as well as changing cloud patterns. It is not possible to obtain a comparable level of detailed…
Future high precision photometric measurements of transiting extrasolar planets promise to tell us much about the nature of these systems. We examine how atmospheric lensing and (projected) planet oblateness/ellipticity modify transit light…
Determining wavelength-dependent exoplanet radii measurements is an excellent way to probe the composition of exoplanet atmospheres. In light of this, Borsa et al. (2016) sought to develop a technique to obtain such measurements by…
Sophisticated atmospheric retrieval algorithms, such as Nested Sampling, explore large parameter spaces by iterating over millions of radiative transfer (RT) calculations. Probability distribution functions for retrieved parameters are…
Planets larger than Earth and smaller than Neptune are some of the most numerous in the galaxy, but observational efforts to understand this population have proved challenging because optically thick clouds or hazes at high altitudes…
Multi-wavelength transit and secondary-eclipse light-curve observations are some of the most powerful techniques to probe the thermo-chemical properties of exoplanets. Although the large planet-to-star brightness contrast and few available…
One of the main endeavors of the field of exoplanetary sciences is the characterization of exoplanet atmospheres on a population level. The current method of choice to accomplish this task is transmission spectroscopy, where the apparent…
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…
We report the first direct detection of an exoplanet in the visible polarized light. The transiting planet HD189733b is one of the very hot Jupiters with shortest periods and, thus, smallest orbits, which makes them ideal candidates for…
[Abridged] Recently, there have been a series of detections of molecules in the atmospheres of extrasolar planets using high spectral resolution (R~100,000) observations, mostly using the CRyogenic high-resolution InfraRed Echelle…
Context. Semi-grey atmospheric models (with one opacity for the visible and one opacity for the infrared) are useful to understand the global structure of irradiated atmospheres, their dynamics and the interior structure and evolution of…
Multi-colour broad-band transit observations offer the opportunity to characterise the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet with small- to medium-sized telescopes. One of the most favourable targets is the hot Jupiter HAT-P-32 b. We combined…
The majority of exoplanets found to date have been discovered via the transit method, and transmission spectroscopy represents the primary method of studying these distant worlds. Currently, in-depth atmospheric characterization of…
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…
The H2O abundance of a planetary atmosphere is a powerful indicator of formation conditions. Inferring H2O in the solar system giant planets is challenging, due to condensation depleting the upper atmosphere of water vapour. Substantially…