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Hajime Kawahara edited this page Dec 11, 2020 · 36 revisions

In the near future, direct imaging missions will search for Earth-like planets around nearby stars. One of the problems is how to characterize the planet's surface. A one-dimensional light curve of a direct-imaged planet will be useful to address this question because the orbital motion and spin rotation of a planet convey information about the spherical surface to the time-series of the light curve. This wiki was made for providing information on the methods, codes, literature, and so on, related to the time-series analysis of the reflected light curve of an exo-Earth for further development to tackle this problem. There are many very good packages for the methods written by the researchers in this field. To compile the links of these packages is also the aim of this wiki. Some of the methods are also implemented in sot package written in Python 3. It is still under construction and sorry for the incompleteness. Any suggestions are welcome (e-mail).

Methods

  • Spin-Orbit Tomography (Mapping) infers geography of a directly-imaged planet from a 1D time-series of the reflected light. It solves the equation of , where : data vector (time), : 2D geometric kernel (time x surface position), : geography (surface position). The extension to time-varying geography is also the linear inverse problem ignoring the spin parameters etc. But, it requires some mathematical tricks to solve it.

  • Spectral Unmixing (SU) infers spectral components of the planet surface. An instantaneous spectrum from an exoplanet is a mixture of spectra from various surface types. SU disentangles these independent components from the multiband light curve, in some algorithms, with a simultaneous solution of geography.

  • Frequency Modulation method provides information on the spin parameters via the modulation factor of the instantaneous frequency.

Misc

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