Earthshine observations of an inhabited planet

Abstract

Earthshine is sunlight that has been reflected from the dayside Earth onto the dark side of the Moon and back again to Earth. In recent times, there has been renewed interest in ground-based visible and near-infrared measurements of earthshine as a proxy for exoplanet observations. Observations of earthshine allow us to explore and characterize the globally integrated photometric, spectral and polarimetric features of the Earth, and to extract precise information on the distinctive characteristics of our planet, and life in particular. They also allow us to quantify how this feature changes with time and orbital configuration. Here we present a brief review of the main earthshine observations and results.

To appear in the proceedings of the Les Houches Winter School "Physics and Astrophysics of Planetary Systems",(EDP Sciences: EAS Publications Series)

References in corpus (4)

• Spectral Evolution of an Earth-Like Planet
• Identifying the rotation rate and the presence of dynamic weather on extrasolar Earth-like planets from photometric observations
• Vegetation signature in the observed globally-integrated spectrum of Earth: Modeling the red edge strength using simultaneous cloud data and application for extrasolar planets
• Biomarkers in disk-averaged near-UV to near-IR Earth spectra using Earthshine observations

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Light and Life: Exotic Photosynthesis in Binary Star Systems
• Polarimetric signature of the oceans as detected by near-infrared Earthshine observations
• The Hubble Space Telescope's near-UV and optical transmission spectrum of Earth as an exoplanet