Related papers: The ARCiS framework for Exoplanet Atmospheres: The…
Aerocapture uses atmospheric drag to decelerate spacecraft and achieve orbit insertion. One of the significant risks associated with aerocapture is the uncertainty in the atmospheric density, particularly for outer planets. The paper…
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…
In current models used to interpret exoplanet atmospheric observations, the planet mass is treated as a prior and is estimated independently with external methods, such as RV or TTV techniques. This approach is necessary as available…
One-dimensional (vertical) models of planetary atmospheres typically balance the net solar and internal energy fluxes against the net thermal radiative and convective heat fluxes to determine an equilibrium thermal structure. Thus,simple…
Rocky exoplanets are faint and difficult to observe due to their small size and low brightness compared to their host star. Despite this, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has allowed us new methods and opportunities to study them.…
The mobility of lighter species on the surface of interstellar dust grains plays a crucial role in forming simple through complex molecules. Carbon monoxide is one of the most abundant molecules, its surface diffusion on the grain surface…
The past decade has led to significant improvements in our understanding of the physical structure of the molecular cores of cold dark clouds. Observational efforts, in combination with improved knowledge of cloud structure, now provide…
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…
We determine the observability in transmission of inhomogeneous cloud cover on the limbs of hot Jupiters through post processing a general circulation model to include cloud distributions computed using a cloud microphysics model. We find…
In order to understand the origin of observed molecular cloud properties, it is critical to understand how clouds interact with their environments during their formation, growth, and collapse. It has been suggested that accretion-driven…
Atmospheric regions below a refractive boundary are hidden in limb observations. Refraction thus creates a gray continuum in the planet's transmission spectrum which can hide spectral features associated with sources of atmospheric opacity.…
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…
We construct models of molecular clouds that are considered as ensembles of transient cores. Each core is assumed to develop in the background gas of the cloud, grow to high density and decay into the background. The chemistry in each core…
Most models used to predict or fit exoplanet transmission spectra do not include all the effects of atmospheric refraction. Namely, the angular size of the star with respect to the planet can limit the lowest altitude, or highest density…
Many of the exoplanets for which we can obtain the highest SNR transit spectra are tidally locked. The atmospheres on tidally-locked planets likely exhibit large differences between the day and night side of the planet, the poles, and the…
Optical phase curves have become one of the common probes of exoplanetary atmospheres, but the information they encode has not been fully elucidated. Building on a diverse body of work, we upgrade the Flexible Modeling System (FMS) to…
Detailed characterization of an extrasolar planet's atmosphere provides the best hope for distinguishing the makeup of its outer layers, and the only hope for understanding the interplay between initial composition, chemistry, dynamics &…
The occurrence of a planet transiting in front of its host star offers the opportunity to observe the planet's atmosphere filtering starlight. The fraction of occulted stellar flux is roughly proportional to the optically thick area of the…
Understanding the survival, growth and dynamics of cold gas is fundamental to galaxy formation. While there has been a plethora of work on `wind tunnel' simulations that study such cold gas in winds, the infall of this gas under gravity is…
Dust grains migrating under Poynting-Robertson drag may be trapped in mean-motion resonances with planets. Such resonantly trapped grains are observed in the solar system. In extrasolar systems, the exozodiacal light produced by dust grains…