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With the new generation of space telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), it is possible to better characterize the atmospheres of exoplanets. The atmospheres of Hot and Ultra Hot Jupiters are highly heterogeneous and…
(Abridged) The upper atmospheres of close-in gas giant exoplanets are subjected to intense heating/tidal forces from their parent stars. Atomic/ionized hydrogen (H) layers are sufficiently rarefied that magnetic pressure may dominate gas…
What kind of environment may exist on terrestrial planets around other stars? In spite of the lack of direct observations, it may not be premature to speculate on exoplanetary climates, for instance to optimize future telescopic…
More than 200 moons exist in our Solar System, yet no exomoon has been confirmed to date. While the innermost two planets of the Solar System lack natural satellites and most studies favour the existence of exomoons around long-period…
We present a grid of forward model transmission spectra, adopting an isothermal temperature-pressure profile, alongside corresponding equilibrium chemical abundances for 117 observationally significant hot exoplanets (Equilibrium…
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…
Short period (<50 days) low-mass (<10Mearth) exoplanets are abundant and the few of them whose radius and mass have been measured already reveal a diversity in composition. Some of these exoplanets are found on eccentric orbits and are…
We present thermal phase curve measurements for the hot Jupiter WASP-103b observed with Hubble/WFC3 and Spitzer/IRAC. The phase curves have large amplitudes and negligible hotspot offsets, indicative of poor heat redistribution to the…
Optical phase curves of hot Jupiters can reveal global scattering properties. We implement a Bayesian inference framework for optical phase curves with flux contributions from: reflected light from a potentially inhomogeneous atmosphere,…
The recent discovery and characterization of the diversity of the atmospheres of exoplanets and brown dwarfs calls for the development of fast and accurate analytical models. We quantify the accuracy of the analytical solution derived in…
Despite swift progress in the characterisation of exoplanet atmospheres in composition and structure, the study of atmospheric dynamics has not progressed at the same speed. While theoretical models have been developed to describe the lower…
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…
Efforts to characterize extrasolar giant planet (EGP) atmospheres have so far emphasized planets within 0.05 AU of their stars. Despite this focus, known EGPs populate a continuum of orbital separations from canonical hot Jupiter values…
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…
The anomalously large radii of strongly irradiated exoplanets have remained a major puzzle in astronomy. Based on a 2D steady state atmospheric circulation model, the validity of which is assessed by comparison to 3D calculations, we reveal…
Mapping exoplanets across phases and during secondary eclipse is a powerful technique for characterizing Hot Jupiters in emission. Since these planets are expected to rotate about axes normal to their orbital planes, with rotation periods…
We present Exo-Transmit, a software package to calculate exoplanet transmission spectra for planets of varied composition. The code is designed to generate spectra of planets with a wide range of atmospheric composition, temperature,…
The direct detection of exoplanets has been the subject of intensive research in the recent years. Data obtained with future high-contrast imaging instruments optimized for giant planets direct detection are strongly limited by the speckle…
High resolution spectroscopy has opened the way for new, detailed study of exoplanet atmospheres. There is evidence that this technique can be sensitive to the complex, three-dimensional (3D) atmospheric structure of these planets. In this…
Robustly modeling the inner edge of the habitable zone is essential for determining the most promising potentially habitable exoplanets for atmospheric characterization. Global climate models (GCMs) have become the standard tool for…