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EP: Fachverband Extraterrestrische Physik

EP 3: Planetary Atmospheres (joint session EP/UP)

EP 3.7: Vortrag

Dienstag, 19. März 2019, 18:00–18:15, HS 22

Spectropolarimetric Simulations of Earthshine — •Mihail Manev¹, Claudia Emde¹, Michael Sterzik², and Stefano Bagnulo³ — ¹Meteorological Institute, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Theresienstr. 37, D-80333 Munich, Germany — ²European Southern Observatory, Karl-Schwarzschild-Str. 2, D-85748 Garching, Germany — ³Armagh Observatory and Planetarium, College Hill, Armagh BT61 9DG, UK

Understanding exoplanet atmospheres and ultimately the remote detection of signatures of life from other worlds belong to the most important goals of modern astrophysics. Earth serves as a benchmark object to infer biosignatures of life as we know it today. One way to study Earth as an exoplanet is to observe Earthshine: sun-light scattered by Earth and back-reflected from the lunar surface to Earth.

Here we interpret spectropolarimertic observations of Earthshine carried out at the VLT (Sterzik et al., Spectral and Temporal Variability of Earth Observed in Polarization, accepted at A&A on 28-Nov-2018, https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.12079) utilizing the Monte Carlo radiative transfer model MYSTIC and employing meteorological and satellite data as an input (Emde et al., Influence of aerosols, clouds, and sunglint on polarization spectra of Earthshine, A&A, Vol. 605, A2, 2017). The results reveal the contributions of the major components of the Earth system to the spectropolarimetric signal: water and land surfaces, vegetation, atmospheric gases, water and ice clouds.

We think that similar simulations will become an important tool for the interpretation of observations of exo-Earth type planets.