| Abstract |
Characterization of exoplanet atmospheres has substantially advanced especially for hot jupiters and directly-imaged giants through observations from UV to ~5μm. While these observations provide accumulating evidence for atmospheric composition and dynamics of this type of planets, the scope is expanding toward cooler and/or smaller planets. In the former half of the talk, I will overview these methods and discuss the challenges in applying them to temperate Earth-sized planets. In the latter half of the talk, I will focus on the potential of precise observations in the mid-infrared (MIR) range (> ~10 μm) that will be enabled by JWST and the future telescopes, as one of the pathways to habitable-zone (HZ) planets. In the MIR, the improved planet-to-star contrast due to planetary thermal emission makes it realistic to identify planetary light without starlight suppression instruments. When a high-resolution spectrograph becomes available, the Doppler-shifted lines of planetary atmospheres would help us disentangle the star+planet spectra and allow us to constrain the planetary atmospheric composition and the orbit. I will examine the feasibility of such a method using several model spectra of temperate Earth-like planets. |
