Enceladus And Jupiter As Exoplanets: The Opposition Surge Effect
Planets and moons in our Solar System have strongly peaked reflected light phase curves at opposition. In this work, we produce a modified reflected light phase curve model and use it to fit the Cassini phase curves of Jupiter and Enceladus.
This opposition effect is caused by shadow hiding (SH; particles or rough terrain cast shadows which are not seen at zero phase) and coherent backscattering (CB; incoming light constructively interferes with outgoing light). We find tentative evidence for CB preference in Jupiter compared to SH, and no evidence of preference in Enceladus.
Jupiter Cassini phase curves from Li et al. (2018), with their corresponding colour filter used in this analysis. The datapoint colours are a crude guide for the different wavelengths of the filters. — astro-ph.EP
We show that the full-width half-maximum (FWHM) of Jupiter’s opposition peak is an order of magnitude larger than that of Enceladus and conclude that this could be used as a solid-surface indicator for exoplanets.
We investigate this and show that modelling the opposition peak FWHM in solid-surface exoplanets would be unfeasible with JWST or the Future Habitable Worlds Observatory due to the very large signal-to-noise required over a small phase range.
K. Jones, B. M. Morris, K. Heng
Comments: Accepted into A&A, 10 pages, 10 figures
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:2502.14629 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2502.14629v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2502.14629
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Related DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202451115
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Submission history
From: Kathryn Jones
[v1] Thu, 20 Feb 2025 15:07:29 UTC (2,019 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14629
Astrobiology,
