Related papers: Aggregate Cloud Particle Effects in Exoplanet Atmo…
Aerosols, both natural and anthropogenic, play an important role in the atmospheric science, by imparting radiative forcing and perturbing the radiative balance of the Earth atmosphere system as well as by degrading the environment. To…
Most of the ordinary matter in the local Universe has not been converted into stars but resides in a largely unexplored diffuse, hot, X-ray emitting plasma. It pervades the gravitational potentials of massive galaxies, groups and clusters…
Context. Dust grains coagulate to form dust aggregates in protoplanetary disks. Their porosity can be extremely high in the disks. Although disk emission may come from fluffy dust aggregates, the emission has been modeled with compact…
Planetary rotation rate is a key parameter in determining atmospheric circulation and hence the spatial pattern of clouds. Since clouds can exert a dominant control on planetary radiation balance, rotation rate could be critical for…
The cumulative effect of the magnetized stellar winds on exoplanets dominates over other forms of star-planet interactions. When combined with photoevaporation, these winds will lead to atmospheric erosion. This is directly connected with…
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…
Clouds and hazes are important throughout our solar system and in the atmospheres of brown dwarfs and extrasolar giant planets. Among the brown dwarfs, clouds control the colors and spectra of the L-dwarfs; the disappearance of clouds helps…
Future high precision photometric measurements of transiting extrasolar planets promise to tell us much about the nature of these systems. We examine how atmospheric lensing and (projected) planet oblateness/ellipticity modify transit light…
Hazes are common in known planet atmospheres, and geochemical evidence suggests early Earth occasionally supported an organic haze with significant environmental and spectral consequences. The UV spectrum of the parent star drives organic…
Many of the exoplanets for which we can obtain the highest SNR transit spectra are tidally locked. The atmospheres on tidally-locked planets likely exhibit large differences between the day and night side of the planet, the poles, and the…
The evolution of stars and planets is mostly controlled by the properties of their atmosphere. This is particularly true in the case of exoplanets close to their stars, for which one has to account both for an (often intense) irradiation…
We show that a consistent fit to observed secondary eclipse data for several strongly irradiated transiting planets demands a temperature inversion (stratosphere) at altitude. Such a thermal inversion significantly influences the…
The planetary exospheres are poorly known in their outer parts, since the neutral densities are low compared with the instruments detection capabilities. The exospheric models are thus often the main source of information at such high…
Constant flux atom deposition into a porous medium is shown to generate a dense overlayer and a diffusion profile. Scaling analysis shows that the overlayer acts as a dynamic control for atomic diffusion in the porous substrate. This is…
First generation optical coronagraphic telescopes will obtain images of cool gas and ice giant exoplanets around nearby stars. The albedo spectra of exoplanets at planet-star separations larger than about 1 AU are dominated by reflected…
Extrasolar planets appear in a chemical diversity unseen in our own solar system. Despite their atmospheres being cold, continuous and transient plasma processes do affect these atmosphere where clouds form with great efficiency. Clouds can…
High-resolution transmission spectroscopy is a powerful method for probing the extended atmospheres of short-period exoplanets. With the advancement of ultra-stable echelle spectrographs and the advent of 30-meter class telescopes on the…
JWST has begun its scientific mission, which includes the atmospheric characterization of transiting exoplanets. Some of the first exoplanets to be observed by JWST have equilibrium temperatures below 1000 K, which is a regime where…
Despite surface liquid water's importance to habitability, observationally diagnosing its presence or absence on exoplanets is still an open problem. Inspired within the Solar System by the differing sulfur cycles on Venus and Earth, we…
With the discovery of hundreds of exoplanets and a potentially huge number of Earth-like planets waiting to be discovered, the conditions for their habitability have become a focal point in exoplanetary research. The classical picture of…