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The planetary exospheres are poorly known in their outer parts, since the neutral densities are low compared with the instruments detection capabilities. The exospheric models are thus often the main source of information at such high…
Eclipse exoplanet spectroscopy has yielded detection of H_2O, CH_4, CO_2 and CO in the atmosphere of hot jupiters and neptunes. About 40 large terrestrial planets are announced or confirmed, two of which are transiting, and another deemed…
The radii of giant planets, as measured from transit observations, may vary with wavelength due to Rayleigh scattering or variations in opacity. Such an effect is predicted to be large enough to detect using ground-based observations at…
The physical characteristics and atmospheric chemical composition of newly discovered exoplanets are often inferred from their transit spectra which are obtained from complex numerical models of radiative transfer. Alternatively, simple…
Observations of exoplanet transit spectra are essential to understanding the physics and chemistry of distant worlds. The effects of opacity sources and many physical processes combine to set the shape of a transit spectrum. Two such key…
We study the phase curves for the planets of our Solar System; which, is considered as a non-compact planetary system. We focus on modeling the small variations of the light curve, based on the three photometric effects: reflection,…
The atmosphere of a transiting planet shields the stellar radiation providing us with a powerful method to estimate its size and density. In particular, because of their high ionization energy, atoms with high atomic number (Z) absorb…
The Sun emits radiation at several wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. In the optical band, the solar radius is 695,700 km and this is what defines the photosphere, the visible surface of the Sun. However, as the altitude…
New observational facilities are beginning to enable insights into the three-dimensional (3D) nature of exoplanets. Transmission spectroscopy is the most widely used method for characterizing transiting temperate exoplanet's atmospheres,…
Before an exoplanet transit, atmospheric refraction bends light into the line of sight of an observer. The refracted light forms a stellar mirage, a distorted secondary image of the host star. I model this phenomenon and the resultant…
In this paper, a detailed Global Circulation Model was employed to feed the PHOENIX code to calculate 3D spectra and light curves of hot Jupiters. Cloud free and dusty radiative luxes for the planet HD179949b were modeled to show…
Several circumbinary planets have recently been discovered. The orbit of a planet around a binary stellar system poses several dynamic constraints. The effects that radiation from the host stars may have on the planet atmospheres must be…
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…
It is well known that planets with radii between that of Earth and Neptune have been the most commonly detected to-date. To classify these planets as either terrestrial or gaseous, typically we turn to mass-radius relations and composition…
The light scattered by an extrasolar Earth-like planet's surface and atmosphere will vary in intensity and color as the planet rotates; the resulting light curve will contain information about the planet's properties. Since most of the…
Several processes can cause the shape of an extrasolar giant planet's shadow, as viewed in transit, to depart from circular. In addition to rotational effects, cloud formation, non-homogenous haze production and movement, and dynamical…
We explore the infrared spectrum of a three-dimensional dynamical model of planet HD209458b as a function of orbital phase. The dynamical model predicts day-side atmospheric pressure-temperature profiles that are much more isothermal at…
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 develop a method for predicting the yield of transiting planets from a photometric survey given the parameters of the survey (nights observed, bandpass, exposure time, telescope aperture, locations of the target fields, observational…
First generation optical coronagraphic telescopes will obtain images of cool gas and ice giant exoplanets around nearby stars. The albedo spectra of exoplanets at planet-star separations larger than about 1 AU are dominated by reflected…