Related papers: exocartographer: A Bayesian Framework for Mapping …
Understanding reflectance-related quantities for worlds enables effective comparative planetology and strengthens mission planning and execution. Measurements of these properties for Earth, especially its geometric albedo and phase…
The detection of Earth-like exoplanets in the habitable zone of their stars, and their spectroscopic characterization in a search for biosignatures, requires starlight suppression that exceeds the current best ground-based performance by…
One of the big challenges in exoplanet science is to determine the atmospheric makeup of extrasolar planets, and to find biosignatures that hint at the existence of biochemical processes on another world. The biomarkers we are trying to…
Observations of stellar surfaces - except for the Sun - are hampered by their tiny angular extent, while observed spectral lines are smeared by averaging over the stellar surface, and by stellar rotation. Exoplanet transits can be used to…
A new generation of telescopes with mirror diameters of 20 m or more, called extremely large telescopes (ELTs) has the potential to provide unprecedented imaging and spectroscopy of exo-planetary systems, if the difficulties in achieving…
Exploring exoplanets has transformed our understanding of the universe by revealing many planetary systems that defy our current understanding. To study their atmospheres, spectroscopic observations are used to infer essential atmospheric…
Even though it was not designed as an exoplanetary research mission, the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) has been opportunistically used for a novel experiment, in which Earth serves as a proxy exoplanet. More than two years of…
Atmospheric characterization of Earth-like exoplanets through reflected light spectroscopy is a key goal for upcoming direct imaging missions. A critical challenge in this endeavor is the accurate determination of planetary mass, which may…
Aiming at obtaining detailed information of surface environment of Earth analogs, Kawahara & Fujii (2011) proposed an inversion technique of annual scattered light curves named the spin-orbit tomography (SOT), which enables one to sketch a…
Exoplanets are abundant in our galaxy and yet characterizing them remains a technical challenge. Solar System planets provide an opportunity to test the practical limitations of exoplanet observations with high signal-to-noise data that we…
With over 1800 planets discovered outside of the Solar System in the past two decades, the field of exoplanetology has broadened our perspective on planetary systems. Research priorities are now moving from planet detection to planet…
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…
Our ability to observe, detect, and characterize exoplanetary atmospheres has grown by leaps and bounds over the last 20 years, aided largely by developments in astronomical instrumentation; improvements in data analysis techniques; and an…
Rapid planetary rotation can cause the equilibrium shape of a planet to be oblate. While planetary oblateness has mostly been probed by examining the subtle ingress and egress features in photometric transit light curves, we investigate the…
Imaging faint objects, such as exoplanets or disks, around nearby stars is extremely challenging because host star images are dominated by the telescope diffraction pattern. Using a coronagraph is an efficient solution for removing…
Earthshine observations offer a unique opportunity to study Earth as an exoplanet seen from the Moon. As the Sun-Earth-Moon geometry changes, Earth can be observed as a spatially unresolved exoplanet at different phase angles, providing…
The direct detection of exoplanets has been the subject of intensive research in the recent years. Data obtained with future high-contrast imaging instruments optimized for giant planets direct detection are strongly limited by the speckle…
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…
A reasonable basis for future astronomical investigations of exoplanets lies in our best knowledge of the planets and satellites in the Solar System. Solar System bodies exhibit a wide variety of surface environments, even including…
Optical phase curves of hot Jupiters can reveal global scattering properties. We implement a Bayesian inference framework for optical phase curves with flux contributions from: reflected light from a potentially inhomogeneous atmosphere,…