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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Vannah, Sara, Stiehl, Ian D., Gleiser, Marcelo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2022
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13344
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author Vannah, Sara
Stiehl, Ian D.
Gleiser, Marcelo
author_facet Vannah, Sara
Stiehl, Ian D.
Gleiser, Marcelo
contents In the past, measures of ``Earth-likeness'' of exoplanets have been qualitative, considered an abiotic Earth, or required discretionary choices of what parameters make a planet Earth-like. With the advent of high-resolution exoplanet spectroscopy, there is a growing need for a method of quantifying the Earth-likeness of a planet that addresses these issues while making use of the data available from modern telescope missions. In this work, we introduce an informational-entropic metric that makes use of the spectrum of an exoplanet to directly quantify how Earth-like the planet is. To illustrate our method, we generate simulated transmission spectra of a series of Earth-like and super-Earth exoplanets, as well as an exoJupiter and several gas giant exoplanets. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate the ability of the information metric to evaluate how similar a planet is to Earth, making it a powerful tool in the search for a candidate Earth 2.0.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2206_13344
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Informational-Entropic Approach to Exoplanet Characterization
Vannah, Sara
Stiehl, Ian D.
Gleiser, Marcelo
Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
In the past, measures of ``Earth-likeness'' of exoplanets have been qualitative, considered an abiotic Earth, or required discretionary choices of what parameters make a planet Earth-like. With the advent of high-resolution exoplanet spectroscopy, there is a growing need for a method of quantifying the Earth-likeness of a planet that addresses these issues while making use of the data available from modern telescope missions. In this work, we introduce an informational-entropic metric that makes use of the spectrum of an exoplanet to directly quantify how Earth-like the planet is. To illustrate our method, we generate simulated transmission spectra of a series of Earth-like and super-Earth exoplanets, as well as an exoJupiter and several gas giant exoplanets. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate the ability of the information metric to evaluate how similar a planet is to Earth, making it a powerful tool in the search for a candidate Earth 2.0.
title An Informational-Entropic Approach to Exoplanet Characterization
topic Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13344