Related papers: Planet cartography with neural learned regularizat…
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…
The search for extrasolar planets has already detected rocky planets and several planetary candidates with minimum masses that are consistent with rocky planets in the habitable zone of their host stars. A low-resolution spectrum in the…
Future telescopes will characterize rocky exoplanets in reflected light, revealing their albedo, which depends on surface, cloud, and atmospheric properties. Identifying these features is crucial for assessing habitability. We present…
Characterizing the surfaces of rocky exoplanets via the scattered light will be an essential challenge to investigate the existence of life on habitable exoplanets. We present a simple reconstruction method for fractional areas of different…
Habitable planets are often defined as terrestrial worlds capable of maintaining surface liquid water. As a result, atmospheric water vapor can be a critical indicator of habitability. Thus, habitability-themed exoplanet investigations…
The time series of light reflected from exoplanets by future direct imaging can provide spatial information with respect to the planetary surface. We apply sparse modeling to the retrieval method that disentangles the spatial and spectral…
Liquid water oceans are at the center of our search for life on exoplanets because water is a strict requirement for life as we know it. However, oceans are dynamic habitats---and some oceans may be better hosts for life than others. In…
Earthshine observations offer a unique opportunity to study Earth as an exoplanet seen from the Moon. As the Sun-Earth-Moon geometry changes, Earth can be observed as a spatially unresolved exoplanet at different phase angles, providing…
Exoplanet detection in the past decade by efforts including NASA's Kepler and TESS missions has discovered many worlds that differ substantially from planets in our own Solar system, including more than 400 exoplanets orbiting binary or…
Photometric variation of a directly imaged planet contains information on both the geography and spectra of the planetary surface. We propose a novel technique that disentangles the spatial and spectral information from the multi-band…
We develop an inversion technique of annual scattered light curves to sketch a two-dimensional albedo map of exoplanets in face-on orbits. As a test-bed for future observations of extrasolar terrestrial planets, we apply this mapping…
Spectral retrieval has long been a powerful tool for interpreting planetary remote sensing observations. Flexible, parameterised, agnostic models are coupled with inversion algorithms in order to infer atmospheric properties directly from…
Thousands of planets beyond our solar system have been discovered to date, dozens of which are rocky in composition and are orbiting within the circumstellar habitable zone of their host star. The next frontier in life detection beyond our…
Astronomical surveys have identified numerous exoplanets with bulk compositions that are unlike the planets of the Solar System, including rocky super-Earths and gas-enveloped sub-Neptunes. Observing the atmospheres of these objects…
Scattered lights from terrestrial exoplanets provide valuable information about the planetary surface. Applying the surface reconstruction method proposed by Fujii et al. (2010) to both diurnal and annual variations of the scattered light,…
Planned missions will spatially resolve temperate terrestrial planets from their host star. Although reflected light from such a planet encodes information about its surface, it has not been shown how to establish surface characteristics of…
In this study, we treat Earth as an exoplanet and investigate our home planet by means of a potential future mid-infrared (MIR) space mission called the Large Interferometer For Exoplanets (LIFE). We combine thermal spectra from an…
Directly imaging extrasolar terrestrial planets necessarily means contending with the astrophysical noise of exozodiacal dust and the resonant structures created by these planets in exozodiacal clouds. Using a custom tailored hybrid…
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…
Astrophysical observations reveal a large diversity of radii and masses of exoplanets. It is important to characterize the interiors of exoplanets to understand planetary diversity and further determine how unique, or not, Earth is.…