With over two dozen exoplanet atmospheres observed today, the field of exoplanet atmospheres is solidly established. The highlights of exoplanet atmosphere studies include: detection of molecular spectral features; constraints on atmospheric vertical temperature structure; detection of day-night temperature gradients; and a new numerical approach to atmosphere temperature and abundance retrieva...

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Recent exploration by the Cassini/Huygens mission has stimulated a great deal of interest in Saturn's moon, Titan. One of Titan's most captivating features is the thick organic haze layer surrounding the moon, believed to be formed from photochemistry high in the CH(4)/N(2) atmosphere. It has been suggested that a similar haze layer may have formed on the early Earth. Here we report laboratory ...

The Earth’s atmosphere is a large scale laboratory to study particles. Particles from stellar processes impinge on the top of the Earth’s atmosphere and propagate downward. Particles from discharge processes at the bottom of the atmosphere propagate upwards into near-Earth space. The acceleration of both particle populations in the Earth’s atmosphere produces electromagnetic radiation which is ...

a Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra 2601, ACT, Australia b School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment, Monash University, Melbourne 3800, VIC, Australia c Department of Physical Sciences, Open University, Milton Keynes, MK76AA, UK d Department of Earth Sciences, The Natural History Museum, London, SW7 5BD, UK e Laboratoire Géosciences Environnement Tou...

The atmospheres of terrestrial planets are expected to be in long-term radiation balance: an increase in the absorption of solar radiation warms the surface and troposphere, which leads to a matching increase in the emission of thermal radiation. Warming a wet planet such as Earth would make the atmosphere moist and optically thick such that only thermal radiation emitted from the upper troposp...

Previous calculations indicate that the Earth suffered impacts from objects up to Mars size. Such a giant impact may have produced a temporary ejecta-based ring that accreted to form the Moon. To simulate the surface waves from such events we approximated the cratering source as a buried pressurized sphere. For a 10 J impactor we calculated the resulting surface wave using the mode summation me...

Space Weather is the study of the conditions in the solar wind that can affect life on the surface of the Earth, particularly the increasingly technologically sophisticated devices that are part of modern life. Solar radio observations are relevant to such phenomena because they generally originate as events in the solar atmosphere, including flares, coronal mass ejections and shocks, that prod...

The results of a project which developed a rendering system to produce synthetic images of the Earth and its atmosphere using purely physical methods are presented. Two distinct features of this system are emphasised: (1) physically realistic models of the atmosphere’s density distribution, the spectral energy distribution of solar radiation impinging on the atmosphere and the molecular scatter...

Iodine-plutonium-xenon isotope systematics have been used to re-evaluate time constraints on the early evolution of the Earth-atmosphere system and, by inference, on the Moon-forming event. Two extinct radionuclides ((129)I, T1/2=15.6 Ma and (244)Pu, T1/2=80 Ma) have produced radiogenic (129)Xe and fissiogenic (131-136)Xe, respectively, within the Earth, the related isotope fingerprints of whic...