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Young self-luminous giant exoplanets are expected to be oblate in shape owing to the high rotational speeds observed for some objects. Similar to the case of brown dwarfs, the thermal emission from these planets should be polarized by…
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 -…
Finding potential life harboring exo-Earths is one of the aims of exoplanetary science. Detecting signatures of life in exoplanets will likely first be accomplished by determining the bulk composition of the planetary atmosphere via…
Astronomical polarimetry is a powerful technique that can provide physical information sometimes difficult or impossible to obtain by any other type of observation. Almost every class of binary star can benefit from polarimetric…
[Abridged] Recently, there have been a series of detections of molecules in the atmospheres of extrasolar planets using high spectral resolution (R~100,000) observations, mostly using the CRyogenic high-resolution InfraRed Echelle…
The ultra-precise photometric space satellite MOST (Microvariability and Oscillations of STars) will provide the first opportunity to measure the albedos and scattered light curves from known short-period extrasolar planets. Due to the…
We show that the parameter space of axion-like particles can be severly constrained using high-precision measurements of quasar polarisations. Robust limits are derived from the measured bounds on optical circular polarisation and from the…
Polarimetry provides key physical information on the properties of interacting binary systems, sometimes difficult to obtain by any other type of observation. Indeed, radiation processes such as scattering by free electrons in the hot…
The spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of some blazars exhibit an ultraviolet (UV) and/or soft X-ray excess, which can be modelled with different radiation mechanisms. Polarization measurements of the UV/X-ray emission from blazars may…
Exploring exoplanets has transformed our understanding of the universe by revealing many planetary systems that defy our current understanding. To study their atmospheres, spectroscopic observations are used to infer essential atmospheric…
We calculate the degree of linear polarization of radiation from stars having planets that may not be resolved spatially. We assume single scattering by water and silicate particulates in the planetary atmosphere. The dilution of the…
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,…
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…
We study the possibility to extract the multipolar moments of an underlying distribution from a set of cosmic rays observed with non-uniform or even partial sky coverage. We show that if the degree is assumed to be upper bounded by $L$,…
Aims. We present a solution to improve the performance of coronagraphs for the detection of exo-planets. Methods. We simulate numerically several kinds of coronagraphic systems, with the aim of evaluating the gain obtained with an adaptive…
We propose a new method for investigating atmospheric inhomogeneities in exoplanets through transmission spectroscopy. Our approach links chromatic variations in conventional transit model parameters (central transit time, total and full…
The occurrence of a planet transiting in front of its host star offers the opportunity to observe the planet's atmosphere filtering starlight. The fraction of occulted stellar flux is roughly proportional to the optically thick area of the…
Transmission spectroscopy can be used to constrain the properties of exoplanetary atmospheres. During a transit, the light blocked from the atmosphere of the planet leaves an imprint in the light coming from the star. This has been shown…
We present a multiple scattering vector radiative transfer model which produces disk integrated, full phase polarized light curves for reflected light from an exoplanetary atmosphere. We validate our model against results from published…
Polarimetry remains a largely unexploited technique in observational X-ray astronomy which could provide insight in the study of the strong gravity and magnetic fields at the core of the Constellation-X observational program. Adding a…