Related papers: Understanding Exoplanet Habitability: A Bayesian M…
Habitability is a measure of an environment's potential to support life, and a habitable exoplanet supports liquid water on its surface. However, a planet's success in maintaining liquid water on its surface is the end result of a complex…
Exoplanet research has shown an incessant growth since the first claim of a hot giant planet around a solar-like star in the mid-1990s. Today, the new facilities are working to spot the first habitable rocky planets around low-mass stars as…
This article summarizes a workshop held on March, 2014, on the potential of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to revolutionize our knowledge of the physical properties of exoplanets through transit observations. JWST's unique…
We present high resolution transmission spectra of giant planet atmospheres from a coupled 3-D atmospheric dynamics and transmission spectrum model that includes Doppler shifts which arise from winds and planetary motion. We model jovian…
Spectra of exoplanet atmospheres provide us the opportunity to improve our understanding of these objects just as remote sensing in our own solar system has increased our understanding of the solar system bodies. The challenge is to…
In support of the National Acadamies' Exoplanet Science Strategy, this whitepaper outlines key technology challenges for studying the diversity of worlds in the Galaxy and in searching for habitable planets. Observations of habitable…
A space telescope capable of high-contrast imaging has been recognized as the avenue toward finding terrestrial planets around nearby Sun-like stars and characterizing their potential habitability. It is thus essential to quantify the…
Due to the unprecedented signal strengths offered by the newest high-resolution spectrographs on 10-m class telescopes, exploring the 3D nature of exoplanets is possible with an unprecedented level of precision. In this paper, we present a…
The habitability of the surface of any planet is determined by a complex evolution of its interior, surface, and atmosphere. The electromagnetic and particle radiation of stars drive thermal, chemical and physical alteration of planetary…
In this white paper, we assess the potential for JWST to characterize the atmospheres of super-Earth exoplanets, by simulating a range of transiting spectra with different masses and temperatures. Our results are based on a JWST simulator…
Inverse techniques are used to extract information about an exoplanet's atmosphere. These techniques are prone to biased results if the appropriate forward model is not used. One assumption used in a forward model is to assume that the…
This article reviews the emerging field of exo-geoscience, focusing on the geological and geophysical processes thought to influence the evolution and (eu)habitability of rocky exoplanets. We examine the possible roles of planetary…
Here we introduce the RobERt (Robotic Exoplanet Recognition) algorithm for the classification of exoplanetary emission spectra. Spectral retrievals of exoplanetary atmospheres frequently requires the preselection of molecular/atomic…
Detailed characterization of an extrasolar planet's atmosphere provides the best hope for distinguishing the makeup of its outer layers, and the only hope for understanding the interplay between initial composition, chemistry, dynamics &…
The advent of high-contrast imaging instruments combined with medium-resolution spectrographs allows spectral and temporal dimensions to be combined with spatial dimensions to detect and potentially characterize exoplanets with higher…
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will devote significant observing time to the study of exoplanets. It will not be serviceable as was the Hubble Space Telescope, and therefore the spacecraft/instruments will have a relatively limited…
Since the discovery of the first extrasolar planet more than twenty years ago, we have discovered nearly four thousand planets orbiting stars other than the Sun. Current observational instruments (on board the Hubble Space Telescope,…
Atmospheric retrievals are widely used to constrain exoplanet properties from observed spectra. We investigate how the common nonphysical retrieval assumptions of vertically constant molecule abundances and cloud-free atmospheres affect our…
Atmospheric retrievals of exoplanet transmission spectra allow constraints on the composition and structure of the day-night terminator region. Such retrievals in the past have typically assumed one-dimensional temperature structures which…
Transmission spectroscopy is still the preferred characterization technique for exoplanet atmospheres, although it presents unique challenges that translate into characterization bottlenecks when robust mitigation strategies are missing.…