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New paper from Lorenzo Cesario 🔭 His third first-author paper, and he only finished his MSc this year. "Characterizing the oxidation state of rocky exoplanets with the Large Interferometer for Exoplanets (LIFE)" Read the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28121 #Exoplanets #PlanetaryScience

So we tested whether it can be measured indirectly. Atmospheres for six mantle oxidation states, twelve orders of magnitude in oxygen fugacity, then a simulation of what LIFE would see for Earth-sized planets at 1 AU around a Sun-like star at 10 parsecs.

The six states can be told apart. Carbon dioxide dominates the oxidised cases, ammonia the reduced ones, and methane peaks in the middle, which is what separates the two most oxidised cases. Plot: retrieved abundance of each gas, black bars for the true values.

Reduced atmospheres are harder to retrieve than oxidised ones, because their spectra are flatter. In the spectra on the first post: top row reduced, bottom oxidised, red the input model, blue the retrieved range, grey the noise. Hydrogen and nitrogen were not useful.