Related papers: exocartographer: A Bayesian Framework for Mapping …
Reflected light photometry of terrestrial exoplanets could reveal the presence of oceans and continents, hence placing direct constraints on the current and long-term habitability of these worlds. Inferring the albedo map of a planet from…
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…
In the near-future, dedicated telescopes observe Earth-like exoplanets in reflected light, allowing their characterization. Because of the huge distances, every exoplanet will be a single pixel, but temporal variations in its spectral flux…
We develop an inversion technique of annual scattered light curves to sketch a two-dimensional albedo map of exoplanets in face-on orbits. As a test-bed for future observations of extrasolar terrestrial planets, we apply this mapping…
The disk-integrated reflected brightness of an exoplanet changes as a function of time due to orbital and rotational motion coupled with an inhomogeneous albedo map. We have previously derived analytic reflected lightcurves for spherical…
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…
The detection and characterization of potentially habitable exoplanets is one of the chief goals of astrophysics for the coming decades. Imaging in reflected light is well suited for characterizing Earth-like planets, as much can be learned…
Reflection spectroscopy holds great promise for characterizing the atmospheres and surfaces of potentially habitable terrestrial exoplanets. The surface of the modern Earth exhibits a sharp albedo change near 750 nm caused by vegetation -…
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…
Scattered lights from terrestrial exoplanets provide valuable information about the planetary surface. Applying the surface reconstruction method proposed by Fujii et al. (2010) to both diurnal and annual variations of the scattered light,…
We develop a new retrieval scheme for obtaining two-dimensional surface maps of exoplanets from scattered light curves. In our scheme, the combination of the L1-norm and Total Squared Variation, which is one of the techniques used in sparse…
We describe how to generate a longitudinal brightness map for a tidally locked exoplanet from its phase function light curve. We operate under a number of simplifying assumptions, neglecting limb darkening/brightening, star spots, detector…
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…
Finding potential life harboring exo-Earths is one of the aims of exoplanetary science. Detecting signatures of life in exoplanets will likely first be accomplished by determining the bulk composition of the planetary atmosphere via…
Future telescopes will characterize rocky exoplanets in reflected light, revealing their albedo, which depends on surface, cloud, and atmospheric properties. Identifying these features is crucial for assessing habitability. We present…
Exoplanet surface imaging, cartography and the search for exolife are the next frontiers of planetology and astrophysics. Here we present an over-view of ideas and techniques to resolve albedo features on exoplanetary surfaces. Albedo maps…
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,…
To date, a handful of exoplanets have been photometrically mapped using phase-modulated reflection or emission from their surfaces, but the small amplitudes of such signals have limited previous maps almost exclusively to coarse dipolar…
Photometric variability of a directly imaged exo-Earth conveys spatial information on its surface and can be used to retrieve a two-dimensional geography and axial tilt of the planet (spin-orbit tomography). In this study, we relax the…
The obliquity of a terrestrial planet is an important clue about its formation and critical to its climate. Previous studies using simulated photometry of Earth show that continuous observations over most of a planet's orbit can be inverted…