Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Dec 2007
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...211.6505l&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #211, #65.05; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.856
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
The discovery of terrestrial planets around nearby stars is one of the major goals of modern astronomy. Space-based missions such as ESA's Darwin and NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder are being developed to catalogue the planets orbiting neighbouring stars in habitable zones. The potential to identify these planets as Earth-like objects depends on our capacity to recognise telluric signatures. This motivates an investigation of the observable signatures due to terrestrial features on Earth, such as the variation in the reflected flux of the planet with rotation. We have investigated the variation of the Earth's photometric flux and the correlation of this variation with surface features of the Earth, using observations of earthshine. In this talk I will present results showing changes of 11-40% in the Earth's reflected light over periods of up to 2 hours. These changes in brightness are accompanied by reddening and correspond to the continental boundary between the Indian Ocean and Africa's East coast. The observed correspondence between terrestrial features and earthshine supports the notion that photometric variability may be used to study the characteristics of Earth-like extrasolar planets.
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