Related papers: Mapping the Surface of Partially Cloudy Exoplanets…
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…
Stellar activity causes difficulties in the characterization of transiting exoplanets. Studies have been performed to quantify its impact on infrared interferometry, but not in the visible domain, which however allows reaching better…
[Abridged] Distant stars and planets will remain spatially unresolved for the foreseeable future. It is nonetheless possible to infer aspects of their brightness markings and viewing geometries by analyzing disk-integrated rotational and…
Although there exists a large sample of known exoplanets, little spectroscopic data exists that can be used to study their global atmospheric properties. This deficiency can be addressed by performing phase-resolved spectroscopy --…
Looking for the primary rainbow in starlight that is reflected by exoplanets appears to be a promising method to search for liquid water clouds in exoplanetary atmospheres. Ice water clouds, that consist of water crystals instead of water…
Unlike previously explored relationships between the properties of hot Jovian atmospheres, the geometric albedo and the incident stellar flux do not exhibit a clear correlation, as revealed by our re-analysis of Q0 to Q14 Kepler data. If…
Optical phase curves have become one of the common probes of exoplanetary atmospheres, but the information they encode has not been fully elucidated. Building on a diverse body of work, we upgrade the Flexible Modeling System (FMS) to…
We propose a method to distinguish between cloudy, hazy and clearsky (free of clouds and hazes) exoplanet atmospheres that could be applicable to upcoming large aperture space and ground-based telescopes such as the James Webb Space…
In recent years, it has become clear that a substantial fraction of transiting exoplanets have some form of aerosol present in their atmospheres. Transit spectroscopy - mostly of hot Jupiters, but also of some smaller planets - has provided…
The prevalence of atmospheres on rocky planets is one of the major questions in exoplanet astronomy, but there are currently no published unambiguous detections of atmospheres on any rocky exoplanets. The MIRI instrument on JWST can measure…
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…
We present a method that employs the secondary eclipse light curves of transiting extrasolar planets to probe the spatial variation of their thermal emission. This technique permits an observer to resolve the surface of the planet without…
Detecting and characterizing the atmospheres of rocky exoplanets has proven to be challenging for JWST. Transit spectroscopy of the TRAPPIST-1 planets has been impacted by the effects of spots and faculae on the host star. Secondary…
The analysis of exoplanetary atmospheres often relies upon the observation of transit or eclipse events. While very powerful, these snapshots provide mainly 1-dimensional information on the planet structure and do not easily allow precise…
The theory of remote sensing shows that observing a planet at multiple phase angles ($\alpha$) is a powerful strategy to characterize its atmosphere. Here, we analyse how the information contained in reflected-starlight spectra of…
One of the frontier research fields of exoplanetary science is the study of the composition and variability of exoplanetary atmospheres. This field is now moving from the gas giant planets towards the smaller and colder telluric planets,…
Context. We present a model-free method for mapping surface brightness variations. Aims. We aim to develop a method that is not dependent on either stellar atmosphere models or limb-darkening equation. This method is optimized for exoplanet…
New observational facilities are becoming increasingly capable of observing reflected light from transiting and directly imaged extrasolar planets. In this study, we provide an analytic framework to interpret observed phase curves,…
In this paper we propose an analytic function for the spherical albedo values of airless and near-airless magma ocean planets (AMOPs). We generated 2-D fractal surfaces with varying compositions onto which we individually threw 10,000 light…
Over the past three decades instruments on the ground and in space have discovered thousands of planets outside the solar system. These observations have given rise to an astonishingly detailed picture of the demographics of short-period…