Related papers: Aggregate Cloud Particle Effects in Exoplanet Atmo…
Clouds have an important role in the atmospheres of planetary bodies. It is expected that, like all the planetary bodies in our solar system, exoplanet atmospheres will also have substantial cloud coverage, and evidence is mounting for…
Aerosols are common in the atmospheres of exoplanets across a wide swath of temperatures, masses, and ages. These aerosols strongly impact observations of transmitted, reflected, and emitted light from exoplanets, obfuscating our…
[Abridged] The transmission of light through a planetary atmosphere can be studied as a function of altitude and wavelength using stellar or solar occultations, giving often unique constraints on the atmospheric composition. For exoplanets,…
Context. The crust composition of rocky exoplanets with a substantial atmosphere can not be observed directly. However, recent developments start to allow the observation and characterisation of their atmospheres. Aims. We aim to establish…
Clouds are an integral part of planetary atmospheres, with most planets hosting clouds. The understanding of not only the formation, but also the composition of clouds is crucial to the understanding of future observations. As observations…
We model the impact of non-uniform cloud cover on transit transmission spectra. Patchy clouds exist in nearly every solar system atmosphere, brown dwarfs, and transiting exoplanets. Our major findings suggest that fractional cloud coverage…
Potentially habitable exoplanets are targets of great interest for the James Webb Space Telescope and upcoming mission concepts such as the Habitable Worlds Observatory. Clouds strongly affect climate and habitability, but predicting their…
Understanding of clouds is instrumental in interpreting current and future spectroscopic observations of exoplanets. Modelling clouds consistently is complex, since it involves many facets of chemistry, nucleation theory, condensation…
The characterization of exoplanetary atmospheres has come of age in the last decade, as astronomical techniques now allow for albedos, chemical abundances, temperature profiles and maps, rotation periods and even wind speeds to be measured.…
Over the last decade, precise exoplanet transmission spectroscopy has revealed the atmospheres of dozens of exoplanets, driven largely by observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope. One major discovery has been the ubiquity of…
Recent transmission spectroscopy has revealed that clouds and hazes are common in the atmospheres of close-in exoplanets. In this study, using the photochemical, microphysical, and transmission spectrum models for close-in warm ($\lesssim$…
The upper atmospheres of the planets and their satellites are more directly exposed to sunlight and solar wind particles than the surface or the deeper atmospheric layers. At the altitudes where the associated energy is deposited, the…
Atmospheric compositions for rocky exoplanets will depend strongly on the bulk planetary composition and the orbital position of the planet. Non-traditional gases may be present in the atmospheres of exceptionally hot planets. Atmospheres…
In order to interpret observations influenced by dust and to perform detailed modeling of the observable characteristics of dust-producing or dust-containing objects, knowledge of the micro-physical properties of relevant dust species are…
Exoplanet atmosphere characterisation has become an important tool in understanding exoplanet formation, evolution. However, clouds remain a key challenge for characterisation: upcoming space telescopes (e.g. JWST, ARIEL) and ground-based…
Exoplanet transit spectroscopy enables the characterization of distant worlds, and will yield key results for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. However, transit spectra models are often simplified, omitting potentially important processes…
Clouds seem like an every-day experience. But -- do we know how clouds form on brown dwarfs and extra-solar planets? How do they look like? Can we see them? What are they composed of? Cloud formation is an old-fashioned but still…
Atmospheric regions below a refractive boundary are hidden in limb observations. Refraction thus creates a gray continuum in the planet's transmission spectrum which can hide spectral features associated with sources of atmospheric opacity.…
Observations suggest an abundance of water and paucity of methane in the majority of observed exoplanetary atmospheres. We isolate the effect of atmospheric processes to investigate possible causes. Previously, we studied the effect of…
Observations of scattered light and thermal emission from hot Jupiter exoplanets have suggested the presence of inhomogeneous aerosols in their atmospheres. 3D general circulation models (GCMs) that attempt to model the effects of aerosols…