Related papers: Tau-REx I: A next generation retrieval code for ex…
Planets reflect and linearly polarize the radiation that they receive from their host stars. The emergent polarization is sensitive to aspects of the planet atmosphere such as the gas composition and the occurrence of condensates and their…
In the near-future, dedicated telescopes observe Earth-like exoplanets in reflected light, allowing their characterization. Because of the huge distances, every exoplanet will be a single pixel, but temporal variations in its spectral flux…
The fields of astronomy and astrophysics are currently engaged in an unprecedented era of discovery as recent missions have revealed thousands of exoplanets orbiting other stars. While the Kepler Space Telescope mission has enabled most of…
The discovery of extrasolar planets is one of the major scientific advances of the last two decades. Hundreds of planets have now been detected and astronomers are beginning to characterise their composition and physical characteristics. To…
The classical picture of our Solar System being the archetypal outcome of planet formation has been rendered obsolete by the astonishing diversity of extrasolar-system architectures. From rare hot-Jupiters to abundant super-Earths and…
The unprecedented wavelength coverage and sensitivity of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) permits to measure the absorption features of a wide range of condensate species from Silicates to Titan tholins. Atmospheric retrievals are…
Remote sensing of the atmospheres of distant worlds motivates a firm understanding of radiative transfer. In this review, we provide a pedagogical cookbook that describes the principal ingredients needed to perform a radiative transfer…
The chromatic contamination that arises from photospheric heterogeneities e.g. spots and faculae on the host star presents a significant noise source for exoplanet transmission spectra. If this contamination is not corrected for, it can…
Ground-based high-resolution spectra provide a powerful tool for characterising exoplanet atmospheres. However, they are greatly hampered by the dominating telluric and stellar lines, which need to be removed prior to any analysis. Such…
Exoplanets are now being discovered in profusion. However, to understand their character requires spectral models and data. These elements of remote sensing can yield temperatures, compositions, and even weather patterns, but only if…
[Abridged] Recently, there have been a series of detections of molecules in the atmospheres of extrasolar planets using high spectral resolution (R~100,000) observations, mostly using the CRyogenic high-resolution InfraRed Echelle…
Transmission spectroscopy provides a powerful probe of the atmospheric properties of transiting exoplanets. To date, studies of exoplanets in transit have focused on inferring their atmospheric properties such as chemical compositions,…
This dissertation as a whole aims to provide means to better understand hot-Jupiter planets through observing, performing thermochemical calculations, and modeling their atmospheres. We used Spitzer multi-wavelength secondary-eclipse…
We develop a new method for analytical inversion of binned exoplanet transit spectra and for retrieval of planet parameters. The method has a geometrical interpretation and treats each observed spectrum as a single vector $\vec r$ in the…
Sophisticated atmospheric retrieval algorithms, such as Nested Sampling, explore large parameter spaces by iterating over millions of radiative transfer (RT) calculations. Probability distribution functions for retrieved parameters are…
To increase the sample size of future atmospheric characterization efforts, we build on the planetary infrared excess (PIE) technique that has been proposed as a means to detect and characterize the thermal spectra of transiting and…
Space-based high contrast imaging mission concepts for studying rocky exoplanets in reflected light are currently under community study. We develop an inverse modeling framework to estimate the science return of such missions given…
Exoplanet research is carried out at the limits of the capabilities of current telescopes and instruments. The studied signals are weak, and often embedded in complex systematics from instrumental, telluric, and astrophysical sources.…
Upcoming space-based coronagraphic instruments in the next decade will perform reflected light spectroscopy and photometry of cool, directly imaged extrasolar giant planets. We are developing a new atmospheric retrieval methodology to help…
We present a new method for performing atmospheric retrieval on ground-based, high-resolution data of exoplanets. Our method combines cross-correlation functions with a random forest, a supervised machine learning technique, to overcome…