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We investigate 3D atmosphere dynamics for tidally locked terrestrial planets with an Earth-like atmosphere and irradiation for different rotation periods ($P_{rot}=1-100$ days) and planet sizes ($R_P=1-2 R_{Earth}$) with unprecedented fine…
Synchronously orbiting, tidally-locked exoplanets with a dayside facing their star and a permanently dark nightside orbiting dim stars are prime candidates for habitability. Simulations of these planets often show the potential to maintain…
Context: Several studies have so far placed useful constraints on planetary atmospheric properties using transmission spectrsocopy, and in the case of HD209458b even the radial velocity of the planet during the transit event has been…
To ensure robust constraints are placed on exoplanet atmospheric transmission spectra, future observations need to obtain high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) measurements assuming smaller amplitude molecular signatures than those of clear…
The radial velocity technique is currently used to classify transiting objects. While capable of identifying grazing binary eclipses, this technique cannot reliably identify blends, a chance overlap of a faint background eclipsing binary…
Rotation in planetary atmospheres plays an important role in regulating atmospheric and oceanic heat flow, cloud formation and precipitation. Using the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) three dimension General Circulation Model…
We investigate the atmospheric dynamics of terrestrial planets in synchronous rotation within the habitable zone of low-mass stars using the Community Atmosphere Model (CAM). The surface temperature contrast between day and night…
We investigate the properties of the hydrodynamic flow around eccentric protoplanets and compare them with the often assumed case of a circular orbit. To this end, we perform a set of 3D hydrodynamic simulations of protoplanets with small…
With the rapid developments in the exoplanet field, more and more terrestrial exoplanets are being detected. Characterising their atmospheres using transit observations will become a key datum in the quest for detecting an Earth-like…
Understanding a planet's atmosphere is a necessary condition for understanding not only the planet itself, but also its formation, structure, evolution, and habitability, This puts a premium on obtaining spectra, and developing credible…
Transmission spectroscopy of exoplanets is a tool to characterize rocky planets and explore their habitability. Using the Earth itself as a proxy, we model the atmospheric cross section as a function of wavelength, and show the effect of…
What makes the study of exoplanetary atmospheres so hard is the extraction of its tiny signal from observations, usually dominated by telluric absorption, stellar spectrum and instrumental noise. The High Resolution Spectroscopy has emerged…
We present radiation transfer models that demonstrate that reflected light levels from three dimensional (3D) exoplanetary atmospheres can be more than 50% lower than those predicted by models of homogeneous or smooth atmospheres. Compared…
Earthshine observations offer a unique opportunity to study Earth as an exoplanet seen from the Moon. As the Sun-Earth-Moon geometry changes, Earth can be observed as a spatially unresolved exoplanet at different phase angles, providing…
Exoplanet atmospheres are the key to understanding the nature of exoplanets. To this end, transit spectrophotometry provides us opportunities to investigate the physical properties and chemical compositions of exoplanet atmospheres. We aim…
The atmospheres of exoplanets reveal all their properties beyond mass, radius, and orbit. Based on bulk densities, we know that exoplanets larger than 1.5 Earth radii must have gaseous envelopes, hence atmospheres. We discuss contemporary…
We investigate spectra of airless rocky exoplanets with a theoretical framework that self-consistently treats reflection and thermal emission. We find that a silicate surface on an exoplanet is spectroscopically detectable via prominent…
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…
We consider the atmospheric flow on short-period extra-solar planets through two-dimensional numerical simulations of hydrodynamics with radiation transfer. One side is always exposed to the irradiation from the host star. The other is…
The rotation of a planet located in the habitable zone of a solar-type star can be reversed by a smooth process associated with the formation of its atmosphere and the increase of stronger torques, opposite to normal tidal torques. Our…