Related papers: Topography of (exo)planets
The discovery of transiting extrasolar planets has enabled us a number of interesting stduies. Transit photometry reveals the radius and the orbital inclination of transiting planets, and thereby we can learn the true mass and the density…
Exoplanet transmission spectra, which measure the absorption of light passing through a planet's atmosphere during transit, are most often assessed globally, resulting in a single spectrum per planetary atmosphere. However, the inherent…
Seeing oceans, continents, quasi-static weather, and other surface features on exoplanets may allow us to detect and characterize life outside the solar system. The Proxima b planet resides within the stellar habitable zone allowing for…
Recently discovered exoplanets on close-in orbits should have surface temperatures of 100's to 1000's of K. They are likely tidally locked and synchronously rotating around their parent stars and, if an atmosphere is absent, have surface…
Observing habitable exoplanets that may resemble Earth is a key priority in astronomy that is dependent on not only detecting such worlds, but also ascertaining that apparent signatures of habitability are not due to other sources. Space…
Future direct-imaging missions such as the Large Interferometer for Exoplanets (LIFE) aim to observe thermal emission from potentially habitable planets to characterize their surface environments and search for signs of life. Previous…
In the last decade, about a dozen giant exoplanets have been directly imaged in the IR as companions to young stars. With photometry and spectroscopy of these planets in hand from new extreme coronagraphic instruments such as SPHERE at VLT…
Cloud computing offers an opportunity to run compute-resource intensive climate models at scale by parallelising model runs such that datasets useful to the exoplanet community can be produced efficiently. To better understand the…
The detection of exoplanets orbiting other stars has revolutionized our view of the cosmos. First results suggest that it is teeming with a fascinating diversity of rocky planets, including those in the habitable zone. Even our closest…
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 &…
Exoplanet habitability is traditionally assessed by comparing a planet's semi-major axis to the location of its host star's "habitable zone," the shell around a star for which Earth-like planets can possess liquid surface water. The Kepler…
Atmospheric collapse is likely to be of fundamental importance to tidally locked rocky exoplanets but remains understudied. Here, general results on the heat transport and stability of tidally locked terrestrial-type atmospheres are…
It is now recognized that energetic stellar photon and particle radiation evaporates and erodes planetary atmospheres and controls upper atmospheric chemistry. Key exoplanet host stars will be too faint at X-ray wavelengths for accurate…
Evidence from the solar system suggests that, unlike Venus and Mars, the presence of a strong magnetic dipole moment on Earth has helped maintain liquid water on its surface. Therefore, planetary magnetism could have a significant effect on…
Context. Clouds have already been detected in exoplanetary atmospheres. They play crucial roles in a planet's atmosphere and climate and can also create ambiguities in the determination of atmospheric parameters such as trace gas mixing…
Over the past three decades, exoplanet research has delivered an extensive census of planets spanning a wide range of masses, sizes, and orbital configurations. Despite this progress, the physical interpretation of these populations remains…
Atmospheric refraction affects to various degrees exoplanet transit, lunar eclipse, as well as stellar occultation observations. Exoplanet retrieval algorithms often use analytical expressions for the column abundance along a ray traversing…
Characterizing the atmospheres of extrasolar planets is the new frontier in exoplanetary science. The last two decades of exoplanet discoveries have revealed that exoplanets are very common and extremely diverse in their orbital and bulk…
Low-mass planets have an extraordinarily diverse range of bulk compositions, from primarily rocky worlds to those with deep gaseous atmospheres. As techniques for measuring the masses of exoplanets are advancing the field towards the…
The holy grail of exoplanet searches is an exo-Earth, an Earth mass planet in the habitable zone around a nearby star. Mass is the most important parameter of a planet and can only be measured by observing the motion of the star around the…