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Session: Stars, Planets and the Interstellar Medium

Name: Prof. Theodora Karalidi (Univ. of Central Florida)
Coauthors: No coauthors were included.
Type: Oral
Title: Seeing the giants in 2D and 3D
Abstract:

Imaged exoplanets and brown dwarfs share a number of properties: from their size to their temperature, gravity and even clouds that form in their atmospheres. Time-resolved observations of brown dwarfs with Spitzer and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) allowed us to study the variable cloud conditions in these atmospheres in a few pressure layers. Ground-based high spectral resolution observations with Keck and other Very Large Telescopes (VLTs) gave us insights in the cloud variability at different pressures. These observations paved the way for the characterization of clouds on imaged exoplanets in the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs) era. In this talk we will discuss how we use time resolved observations to study giant imaged atmospheres and constrain their structure in 2D and 3D. We will see how ground-based observations, in tandem with HST and Spitzer observations, allowed us to study the approximate-3D structure of some atmospheres and how the larger wavelength coverage of JWST will allow us to study imaged atmospheres in 3D. We will see how the large informational content of JWST time-resolved observations necessitates the creation of new tools for the characterization of these atmospheres. Finally, we will see how polarimetry complements flux observations and how it will help break degeneracies that flux-only observations have, allowing us to accurately characterize giant imaged atmospheres in the JWST and ELTs era.