Mapping Alien Worlds: from Infernal to Habitable Worlds 

Although we will never get the same level of details for exoplanets as we do for Solar System bodies, the large diversity of exoplanets revealed by exoplanet hunting missions, e.g. Kepler and TESS, provide thousands of study cases to refine formation and evolution pathways as well as theories of how their climate is shaped by their environment. Particularly amenable for atmospheric characterization, short-period exoplanets with dayside blasted with stellar radiation are some of the best-characterized exoplanets to this day. Due to their synchronous rotation, they exhibit large day-to-night difference, and their observation can be difficult to interpret without a full understanding of their “3D-ness”. In the past 2 decades, a suite of observational techniques along with new space-based and ground-based observatories with exquisite precision that now allows us to reveal the inhomogeneous nature of these exoplanets and provide a more comprehensive view into their atmosphere, or lack thereof. In this talk, I will present what we have learned from observations of a variety of close-in planets ranging from scorching hot exoplanets and how these observational techniques are now used to study temperate rocky planets to investigate their habitability.