Related papers: Exploring and Validating Exoplanet Atmospheric Ret…
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…
With the recent discoveries of hundreds of extrasolar planets, the search for planets like Earth and life in the universe, is quickly gaining momentum. In the future, large space observatories could directly detect the light scattered from…
Atmospheric retrievals are now a standard tool to analyze observations of exoplanet atmospheres. This data-driven approach quantitatively compares atmospheric models to observations in order to estimate atmospheric properties and their…
Much of the focus of exoplanet atmosphere analysis in the coming decade will be atinfrared wavelengths, with the planned launches of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST). However,…
Transmission spectroscopy has proven to be an effective technique for characterizing exoplanet atmospheres. However, transmission spectroscopy requires planetary transits, which occur for only a small fraction of planetary systems due to…
One of the most prolific methods of studying exoplanet atmospheres is transmission spectroscopy, which measures the difference between the depth of an exoplanet's transit signal at various wavelengths and attempts to correlate the depth…
The direct observation of cold and temperate planets within 1 to 10 AU would be extremely valuable for uncovering their atmospheric compositions but remains a formidable challenge with current astronomical methods. Ground-based optical…
Even though it was not designed as an exoplanetary research mission, the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) has been opportunistically used for a novel experiment, in which Earth serves as a proxy exoplanet. More than two years of…
Ground-based telescopes have been playing a leading role in exoplanet direct imaging science and technological development for the past two decades and will continue to have an indispensable role for the next decade and beyond. Extreme…
Exoplanets are now being discovered in profusion. However, to understand their character requires spectral models and data. These elements of remote sensing can yield temperatures, compositions, and even weather patterns, but only if…
Direct detection, also known as direct imaging, is a method for discovering and characterizing the atmospheres of planets at intermediate and wide separations. It is the only means of obtaining spectra of non-transiting exoplanets.…
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has provided the first opportunity to study the atmospheres of terrestrial exoplanets and estimate their surface conditions. Earth-sized planets around Sun-like stars are currently inaccessible with…
In the past decade the study of exoplanet atmospheres at high-spectral resolution, via transmission/emission spectroscopy and cross-correlation techniques for atomic/molecular mapping, has become a powerful and consolidated methodology. The…
Exoplanets are abundant in our galaxy and yet characterizing them remains a technical challenge. Solar System planets provide an opportunity to test the practical limitations of exoplanet observations with high signal-to-noise data that we…
We are now on a clear trajectory for improvements in exoplanet observations that will revolutionize our ability to characterize their atmospheric structure, composition, and circulation, from gas giants to rocky planets. However, exoplanet…
The field of exoplanets has rapidly expanded from the exclusivity of exoplanet detection to include exoplanet characterization. A key step towards this characterization will be retrieval of planetary albedos and rotation rates from highly…
In the near-future, dedicated telescopes observe Earth-like exoplanets in reflected light, allowing their characterization. Because of the huge distances, every exoplanet will be a single pixel, but temporal variations in its spectral flux…
Inverse techniques are used to extract information about an exoplanet's atmosphere. These techniques are prone to biased results if the appropriate forward model is not used. One assumption used in a forward model is to assume that the…
Studies of future space- and ground-based exoplanet surveys often rely on models of planetary systems to simulate instrument response, estimate scientific yields, perform trade analyses, and study efficient observation strategies. Until…
It is possible to learn a great deal about exoplanet atmospheres even when we cannot spatially resolve the planets from their host stars. In this chapter, we overview the basic techniques used to characterize transiting exoplanets -…