I recently gave a talk about my work at the conference High-Resolution Exoplanet and Stellar Characterization Today and in the ELT Era (TwoHorses). You can watch the recording here!
When climate scientists attempt to predict how Earth will respond to increasing greenhouse gases, one of their main challenges is understanding the impact of clouds. It is important to comprehensively understand clouds as they can exert competing cooling and warming influences on Earth. Forecasts of the evolution of Earth’s climate rely on detailed mathematical models and computer simulations. The best way to confirm if these models and predictions are accurate is to observe real atmospheres. Since we cannot directly measure future changes to Earth’s atmosphere or assess the impacts of varying levels of greenhouse gases, we must turn to other planets to provide these critical observations.
Exoplanets are the ideal natural experiments for understanding planetary climate. Investigating
these diverse systems allows us to explore far hotter and colder worlds than in our solar system. Most
observations of exoplanets have been conducted by studying starlight filtering through the planet’s
atmosphere or heat emitted by the planet. There have been very few studies of exoplanets in starlight
reflected from their atmospheres. However, reflected light is widely acknowledged as the future of
exoplanet characterization, especially for Earth-like exoplanets. Despite the inherent benefits,
reflected light from exoplanets has proven very challenging to detect.
We aim to establish an unequivocal ground-based detection of reflected light from an
exoplanet.