Signatures of Water Clouds on Exoplanets: Numerical Simulations.

Details Signatures of Water Clouds on Exoplanets: Numerical Simulations. Signatures of Water Clouds on Exoplanets: Numerical Simulations.

Dec 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011aspc..450..101k&link_type=abstract

Molecules in the Atmospheres of Extrasolar Planets, proceedings of a conference held at Observatoire de Paris, Paris, France 19-

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Clouds are of crucial importance for a planetary climate, because they store atmospheric volatiles, and because they scatter and absorb incident starlight and absorb, emit and scatter thermal radiation. Consequently, the detection and characterization of clouds on a planet can provide us with a wealth of information on the conditions on the surface. Here, we present numerically simulated flux and polarization spectra, from 0.3 μm to 1.0 μm, of starlight reflected by Earth-like exoplanets that are covered by horizontally homogeneous water clouds, for different cloud altitudes and particle sizes. Our results show that the degree of polarization P is sensitive to the particle size, in particular at phase angles between 30° and ˜50° and around 90°, and to the cloud top altitude, in particular at wavelengths between 0.35 μm and 0.7 μm. The information in P should be easier to retrieve than that in F.

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