Enceladus and Jupiter as exoplanets: the opposition surge effect

TL;DR

This study models the opposition surge effect in Solar System planets and moons, using Cassini data to distinguish shadow hiding and coherent backscattering, with implications for exoplanet surface characterization.

Contribution

It introduces a modified phase curve model to analyze opposition effects and demonstrates how FWHM measurements can indicate surface types on exoplanets.

Findings

Jupiter shows tentative evidence for coherent backscattering.

Enceladus shows no evidence of the coherent backscattering preference.

FWHM of Jupiter's opposition peak is much larger than Enceladus's, indicating surface differences.

Abstract

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. 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.