Related papers: Exploring A Photospheric Radius Correction to Mode…
The radius of an exoplanet may be affected by various factors, including irradiation, planet mass and heavy element content. A significant number of transiting exoplanets have now been discovered for which the mass, radius, semi-major axis,…
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…
Transmission spectroscopy of exoplanets is a tool to characterize rocky planets and explore their habitability. Using the Earth itself as a proxy, we model the atmospheric cross section as a function of wavelength, and show the effect of…
Rotation and orbital eccentricity both strongly influence planetary climate. Eccentricities can often be measured for exoplanets, but rotation rates are currently difficult or impossible to constrain. Here we examine how the combined…
Inverse techniques are used to extract information about an exoplanet's atmosphere. These techniques are prone to biased results if the appropriate forward model is not used. One assumption used in a forward model is to assume that the…
Robust atmospheric and radiative transfer modeling will be required to properly interpret reflected light and thermal emission spectra of terrestrial exoplanets. This will help break observational degeneracies between the numerous…
Long-period transiting exoplanets provide an opportunity to study the mass-radius relation and internal structure of extrasolar planets. Their studies grant insights into planetary evolution akin to the Solar System planets, which, in…
Transiting extrasolar planets provide an opportunity to study the mass-radius relation of planets as well as their internal structure. The existence of a secondary eclipse enables further study of the thermal properties of the the planet by…
Determining wavelength-dependent exoplanet radii measurements is an excellent way to probe the composition of exoplanet atmospheres. In light of this, Borsa et al. (2016) sought to develop a technique to obtain such measurements by…
Exoplanet transit spectroscopy enables the characterization of distant worlds, and will yield key results for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. However, transit spectra models are often simplified, omitting potentially important processes…
Transiting exoplanets provide detailed access to their atmospheres, as the planet's signal can be effectively separated from that of its host star. For transiting exoplanets three fundamental atmospheric measurements are possible:…
It has been posited that lunar eclipse observations may help predict the in-transit signature of Earth-like extrasolar planets. However, a comparative analysis of the two phenomena addressing in detail the transport of stellar light through…
Existing upper limits on variations in the photospheric radius of the Sun during the solar magnetic activity cycle are at a fractional amplitude of 2x10^{-4}. At that level, the transit duration of a close-in planet around a Sun-like star…
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…
We quantify the systematic impact of the non-spherical shape of transiting planets and brown dwarfs, due to tidal forces and rotation, on the observed transit depth. Such a departure from sphericity leads to a bias in the derivation of the…
About 4000 exoplanets have been confirmed since the year of 1992, and for most of the planets, the main parameters that can be measured are planetary radius and mass. Based on these two parameters, surface gravity can be estimated. In this…
It is well-known that the light curve of a transiting planet contains information about the planet's orbital period and size relative to the host star. More recently, it has been demonstrated that a tight constraint on an individual…
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…
We investigate the effect of planetary rotation on the transit spectrum of an extrasolar giant planet. During ingress and egress, absorption features arising from the planet's atmosphere are Doppler shifted by of order the planet's…
Out of the known transiting extrasolar planets, the majority are gas giants orbiting their host star at close proximity. Both theoretical and observational studies support the hypothesis that such bodies emit significant amounts of flux…