Related papers: Analytic Reflected Lightcurves for Exoplanets
A trending astronomical phenomenon to study is the variation in brightness of asteroids, caused by its rotation on its own axis, non-spherical shapes, changes of albedo along its surface and its position relative to the sun. The latter…
The photometric transit method has been the most effective method to detect and characterize exoplanets as several ground-based as well as space-based survey missions have discovered thousands of exoplanets using this method. With the…
The reflected spectra of extrasolar giant planets are primarily influenced by Rayleigh scattering, molecular absorption, and atmospheric condensates. We present model geometric albedo and phase integral spectra and Bond albedos for planets…
Planets emit thermal radiation and reflect incident light that they recieve from their host stars. As a planet orbits it's host star the photometric variations associated with these two effects produce very similar phase curves. If observed…
Direct imaging of exoplanets presents both significant challenges and significant gains. The advantages primarily lie in receiving emitted and, with future instruments, reflected photons at phase angles not accessible by other techniques,…
In the past decade the study of exoplanet atmospheres at high-spectral resolution, via transmission/emission spectroscopy and cross-correlation techniques for atomic/molecular mapping, has become a powerful and consolidated methodology. The…
We derive analytic, closed form, numerically stable solutions for the total flux received from a spherical planet, moon or star during an occultation if the specific intensity map of the body is expressed as a sum of spherical harmonics.…
Ground-based astro-geodetic observations and atmospheric occultations, are two examples of observational techniques requiring a scrutiny analysis of atmospheric refraction. In both cases, the measured changes in observables are…
Hot super Earths are exoplanets with short orbital periods ($<$ 10 days), heated by their host stars to temperatures high enough for their rocky surfaces to become molten. A few hot super Earths exhibit high geometric albedos ($>$ 0.4) in…
The simple reflection of a light beam of finite transverse extent from a homogenous interface gives rise to a surprisingly large number of subtle shifts and deflections which can be seen as diffractive corrections to the laws of geometrical…
The last decade has witnessed a rapid growth of the field of exoplanet discovery and characterisation. However, several big challenges remain, many of which could be addressed using machine learning methodology. For instance, the most…
A significant body of work on simulating the remote appearance of Earth-like exoplanets has been done over the last decade. The research is driven by the prospect of characterizing habitable planets beyond the Solar System in the near…
With the recent discoveries of hundreds of extrasolar planets, the search for planets like Earth and life in the universe, is quickly gaining momentum. In the future, large space observatories could directly detect the light scattered from…
The physical characteristics and atmospheric chemical composition of newly discovered exoplanets are often inferred from their transit spectra which are obtained from complex numerical models of radiative transfer. Alternatively, simple…
The surface characterization of rocky exoplanets via emission spectroscopy represents a frontier of current (JWST) and future (HWO) observational efforts. Here, we implement new features in the open-source retrieval code $\texttt{POSEIDON…
High-contrast imaging surveys for exoplanet detection have shown giant planets at large separations to be rare. It is important to push towards detections at smaller separations, the part of the parameter space containing most planets. The…
We model the light-curves from radiation-driven clouds near an accreting black hole. Taking into account the multiple images due to strong gravitational lensing, we find that sharp spikes can significantly enhance the observed flux.…
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…
The varied surfaces and atmospheres of planets make them interesting places to live, explore, and study from afar. Unfortunately, the great distance to exoplanets makes it impossible to resolve their disk with current or near-term…
Unlike previously explored relationships between the properties of hot Jovian atmospheres, the geometric albedo and the incident stellar flux do not exhibit a clear correlation, as revealed by our re-analysis of Q0 to Q14 Kepler data. If…