Related papers: Detecting Oceans on Exoplanets with Phase-Dependen…
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: Combining high-contrast imaging with medium- or high-resolution integral field spectroscopy has the potential to boost the detection rate of exoplanets, especially at small angular separations. Furthermore, it immediately provides…
The search for extrasolar rocky planets has already found the first transiting rocky super-Earth, Corot 7b, with a surface temperature that allows for magma oceans. Here we ask if we could distinguish rocky planets with recent major…
The Planetary Camera and Spectrograph (PCS) for the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) will be dedicated to detecting and characterising nearby exoplanets with sizes from sub-Neptune to Earth-size in the neighbourhood of the Sun. This goal is…
We investigate the possibility of exoplanet detection orbiting source stars in microlensing events through WFIRST observations. We perform a Monto Carlo simulation on the detection rate of exoplanets via microlensing, assuming that each…
We present the results of a study to optimize the principal component analysis (PCA) algorithm for planet detection, a new algorithm complementing ADI and LOCI for increasing the contrast achievable next to a bright star. The stellar PSF is…
At optical wavelengths, Titan's brightness for large Sun-Titan-observer phase angles significantly exceeds its dayside brightness. The brightening that occurs near back-illumination is due to moderately large haze particles in the moon's…
Differential spectroscopy during exoplanet transits permits to reconstruct spectra of small stellar surface portions that successively become hidden behind the planet. The center-to-limb behavior of stellar line shapes, asymmetries and…
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…
One of the obstacles in the search for exoplanets via transits is the large number of candidates that must be followed up, few of which ultimately prove to be exoplanets. Any method that could make this process more efficient by somehow…
The next generation of exoplanet space photometry missions proposed by both NASA and ESA promise to discover small transiting planets around the nearest and brightest main-sequence stars. The physical and rotational properties of these…
Observations suggest an abundance of water and paucity of methane in the majority of observed exoplanetary atmospheres. We isolate the effect of atmospheric processes to investigate possible causes. Previously, we studied the effect of…
A carbon-to-oxygen ratio (C/O) of around unity is believed to act as a natural separator of water- and methane-dominated spectra when characterizing exoplanet atmospheres. In this paper we quantify the C/O ratios at which this separation…
Using forward models for representative exoplanet atmospheres and a radiometric instrument model, we have generated synthetic observational data to explore how well the major C- and O-bearing chemical species (CO, CO2, CH4, and H2O),…
The next decade will see two large-scale space-based near-infrared surveys, Euclid and WFIRST. This paper shows that the subtle differences between the filters proposed for these surveys and those from ground-based photometric systems will…
Transit-spectroscopy of exoplanets is one of the key observational techniques to characterize the extrasolar planet and its atmosphere. The observational challenges of these measurements require dedicated instrumentation and only the space…
One of the promising methods to search for life on extra-solar planets (exoplanets) is to detect life's signatures in their atmospheres. Spectra of exoplanet atmospheres at the modest resolution needed to search for oxygen, carbon dioxide,…
Large ground- and space-based telescopes will be able to observe Earth-like planets in the near future. We explore how different planetary surfaces can strongly influence the climate, atmospheric composition, and remotely detectable spectra…
Gravitational microlensing provides a unique window on the properties and prevalence of extrasolar planetary systems because of its ability to find low-mass planets at separations of a few AU. The early evidence from microlensing indicates…
The majority of exoplanets found to date have been discovered via the transit method, and transmission spectroscopy represents the primary method of studying these distant worlds. Currently, in-depth atmospheric characterization of…