Related papers: The air over there: exploring exoplanet atmosphere…
The review aims to give an overview of atmospheric escape processes from exoplanets. I briefly discuss the physics of various escape processes responsible for atmospheric escape across different types of exoplanets. Transmission…
Past studies have revealed the dependency of the disc parameters (mass, radius, viscosity, grain fragmentation velocity, dust-to-gas ratio) on the formation of giant planets, where more massive discs seem beneficial for giant planet…
The upper atmospheres of the planets and their satellites are more directly exposed to sunlight and solar wind particles than the surface or the deeper atmospheric layers. At the altitudes where the associated energy is deposited, the…
Advancements in our understanding of exoplanetary atmospheres, from massive gas giants down to rocky worlds, depend on the constructive challenges between observations and models. We are now on a clear trajectory for improvements in…
This chapter reviews the current state of observational and theoretical efforts in the characterization of exoplanet atmospheres, with a focus on developments enabled through the Swiss National Centre for Competence in Research (NCCR)…
Since the discovery of the first extrasolar planet more than twenty years ago, we have discovered nearly four thousand planets orbiting stars other than the Sun. Current observational instruments (on board the Hubble Space Telescope,…
At the dawn of the first discovery of exoplanets orbiting sun-like stars in the mid-1990s, few believed that observations of exoplanet atmospheres would ever be possible. After the 2002 Hubble Space Telescope detection of a transiting…
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…
We present a time-dependent radiative model for the atmosphere of the transiting planets that take into account the eccentricity of their orbit. We investigate the temporal temperature and flux variations due to the planet-star distance…
Exoplanet properties depend on how well the host star is characterized. For instance, the stellar atmospheric parameters (i.e., effective temperature, surface gravity and overall metallicity) are needed to derive the stellar mass and radius…
The best-characterized exoplanets to date are planets on close-in transiting orbits around their host stars. The high level of irradiation and transiting geometry of these objects make them ideal targets for atmospheric investigations.…
To date, the ability for observers to reveal the composition or thermal structure of an exoplanet's atmosphere has rested on two techniques: high-contrast direct imaging and time-series observations of transiting exoplanets. The former is…
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 bulk composition of an exoplanet is commonly inferred from its average density. For small planets, however, the average density is not unique within the range of compositions. Variations of a number of important planetary…
We present a comprehensive theory of the spectra and atmospheres of irradiated extrasolar giant planets. We explore the dependences on stellar type, orbital distance, cloud characteristics, planet mass, and surface gravity. Phase-averaged…
Today, we know ~4330 exoplanets orbiting their host stars in ~3200 planetary systems. The diversity of these exoplanets is large, and none of the known exoplanets is a twin to any of the solar system planets, nor is any of the known…
The field of exoplanet atmospheric characterization has recently made considerable advances with the advent of high-resolution spectroscopy from large ground-based telescopes and the commissioning of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).…
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…
Most our knowledge about rocky exoplanets is based on their measure of mass and radius. These two parameters are routinely measured and are used to categorise different populations of observed exoplanets. They are also tightly linked to the…
Exoplanetary atmospheric retrieval refers to the inference of atmospheric properties of an exoplanet given an observed spectrum. The atmospheric properties include the chemical compositions, temperature profiles, clouds/hazes, and energy…