Related papers: Reflected-light Phase Curves with PICASO: A Kepler…
We develop an inversion technique of annual scattered light curves to sketch a two-dimensional albedo map of exoplanets in face-on orbits. As a test-bed for future observations of extrasolar terrestrial planets, we apply this mapping…
Motivated by the observational evidence of inhomogeneous clouds in exoplanetary atmospheres, we investigate how proposed simple cloud distributions can affect atmospheric circulations and infrared emission. We simulated temperatures and…
Similar to the case of solar system planets, reflected starlight from exoplanets is expected to be polarized due to atmospheric scattering and the net disk integrated polarization should be non-zero owing to the asymmetrical illumination of…
Direct imaging has paved the way for atmospheric characterization of young and self-luminous gas giants. Scattering in a horizontally-inhomogeneous atmosphere causes the disk-integrated polarization of the thermal radiation to be linearly…
Light curves show the flux variation from the target star and its orbiting planets as a function of time. In addition to the transit features created by the planets, the flux also includes the reflected light component of each planet, which…
Unlike previously explored relationships between the properties of hot Jovian atmospheres, the geometric albedo and the incident stellar flux do not exhibit a clear correlation, as revealed by our re-analysis of Q0 to Q14 Kepler data. If…
With the increasing number of directly imaged giant exoplanets the current atmosphere models are often not capable of fully explaining the spectra and luminosity of the sources. A particularly challenging component of the atmosphere models…
We observed two full orbital phase curves of the transiting brown dwarf KELT-1b, at 3.6um and 4.5um, using the Spitzer Space Telescope. Combined with previous eclipse data from Beatty et al. (2014), we strongly detect KELT-1b's phase…
Hot Jupiters are expected to be dark from both observations (albedo upper limits) and theory (alkali metals and/or TiO and VO absorption). However, only a handful of hot Jupiters have been observed with high enough photometric precision at…
Here we present an open-source cloud model for substellar atmospheres, called Virga. The Virga-v0 series has already been widely adopted in the literature. It is written in Python and has heritage from the Ackerman & Marley (2001) model…
Future space-based direct imaging missions will perform low-resolution (R$<$100) optical (0.3-1~$\mu$m) spectroscopy of planets, thus enabling reflected spectroscopy of cool giants. Reflected light spectroscopy is encoded with rich…
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…
Light curve modulations in the sample of Kepler planet candidates allows the disentangling of the nature of the transiting object by photometrically measuring its mass. This is possible by detecting the effects of the gravitational pull of…
The disk-integrated reflected brightness of an exoplanet changes as a function of time due to orbital and rotational motion coupled with an inhomogeneous albedo map. We have previously derived analytic reflected lightcurves for spherical…
Program SHELLSPEC is designed to calculate light-curves, spectra and images of interacting binaries and extrasolar planets immersed in a moving circumstellar environment which is optically thin. It solves simple radiative transfer along the…
The direct detection of new extrasolar planets from high-precision photometry data is commonly based on the observation of the transit signal of the planet as it passes in front of its star. Close-in planets, however, leave additional…
NASA's Kepler Mission promises to detect transiting Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of solar-like stars. In addition, it will be poised to detect the reflected light component from close-in extrasolar giant planets (CEGPs)…
Optical, reflected light eclipse observations provide a direct probe of the exoplanet scattering properties, such as from aerosols. We present here the photometric, reflected light observations of WASP-43b using the HST WFC3/UVIS instrument…
We present two independent, homogeneous, global analyses of the transit light curves, radial velocities and spectroscopy of Kepler-4b through Kepler-8b, with numerous differences over the previous methods. These include: 1) improved…
Terrestrial exoplanets in habitable zones are ubiquitous. It is, however, unknown which have Earth-like or Venus-like climates. Distinguishing different planet-types is crucial for determining whether a planet could be habitable. We…