Related papers: Exoplanet Clouds
At the dawn of the first discovery of exoplanets orbiting sun-like stars in the mid-1990s, few believed that observations of exoplanet atmospheres would ever be possible. After the 2002 Hubble Space Telescope detection of a transiting…
Chemical kinetics plays an important role in controlling the atmospheric composition of all planetary atmospheres, including those of extrasolar planets. For the hottest exoplanets, the composition can closely follow…
The architecture of exoplanetary systems is often different from the solar system, with some exoplanets being in close orbits around their host stars and having orbital periods of only a few days. In analogy to interactions between stars in…
Since the discovery of the first extrasolar planet more than twenty years ago, we have discovered nearly four thousand planets orbiting stars other than the Sun. Current observational instruments (on board the Hubble Space Telescope,…
The study of planets outside our solar system may lead to major advances in our understanding of the Earth, and provide insight into the universal set of rules by which planets form and evolve. To achieve these goals requires applying…
Aerosol opacity has emerged as a critical factor controlling transmission and emission spectra. We provide a simple guideline for the effects of aerosol morphology on opacity and residence time in the atmosphere, as it pertains to transit…
The presence of aerosols in an exoplanet atmosphere can veil the underlying material and can lead to a flat transmission spectrum during primary transit observations. In this work, we explore forward scattering effects from super-micron…
Planets reflect and linearly polarize the radiation that they receive from their host stars. The emergent polarization is sensitive to aspects of the planet atmosphere such as the gas composition and the occurrence of condensates and their…
Over the last two decades, the discovery of exoplanets has fundamentally changed our perception of the universe and humanity's place within it. Recent work indicates that a solar system's X-ray and high energy particle environment is of…
We know that giant planets played a crucial role in the making of our Solar System. The discovery of giant planets orbiting other stars is a formidable opportunity to learn more about these objects, what is their composition, how various…
Phase curves are the best technique to probe the three dimensional structure of exoplanets' atmospheres. In this chapter we first review current exoplanets phase curve observations and the particular challenges they face. We then describe…
We suggest that some extrasolar planets <~ 60 Earth masses will form substantially from silicon carbide and other carbon compounds. Pulsar planets and low-mass white dwarf planets are especially good candidate members of this new class of…
Recent observations indicate potentially carbon-rich exoplanet atmospheres. Spectral fitting methods for brown dwarfs and exoplanets have invoked the C/O ratio as additional parameter but carbon-rich cloud formation modeling is a challenge…
For much of human history we have wondered how our solar system formed, and whether there are any other planets like ours around other stars. Only in the last 20 years have we had direct evidence for the existence of exoplanets, with the…
Context. The crust composition of rocky exoplanets with a substantial atmosphere can not be observed directly. However, recent developments start to allow the observation and characterisation of their atmospheres. Aims. We aim to establish…
Observations suggest an abundance of water and paucity of methane in the majority of observed exoplanetary atmospheres. We isolate the effect of atmospheric processes to investigate possible causes. Previously, we studied the effect of…
As the characterization of exoplanet atmospheres proceeds, providing insights into atmospheric chemistry and composition, a key question is how much deeper into the planet we might be able to see from its atmospheric properties alone. For…
Exoplanets number in their thousands, and the number is ever increasing with the advent of new surveys and improved instrumentation. One of the most surprising things we have learnt from these discoveries is not that small-rocky planets in…
As a test-bed for future investigations of directly imaged terrestrial exoplanets, we present the recovery of the surface components of the Earth from multi-band diurnal light curves obtained with the EPOXI spacecraft. We find that the…
All planets and satellites of our solar system are subject to a continuous rain of material, ranging in size from specks of dust to objects the size of boulders. Upon impact, these objects deposit their kinetic energy into the incident…