Related papers: Optimal Measures for Characterizing Water-rich Sup…
Close-in lava planets represent an extreme example of terrestrial worlds, but their high temperatures may allow us to probe a diversity of crustal compositions. The brightest and most well-studied of these objects is 55 Cancri e, a nearby…
Inferences of molecular compositions of exoplanetary atmospheres have generally focused on C, H, and O-bearing molecules. Recently, additional absorption in HST WFC3 transmission spectra around 1.55$\mu$m has been attributed to…
Most rocky planets in the galaxy orbit a cool host star, and there is large uncertainty among theoretical models whether these planets can retain an atmosphere. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) might be able to settle this question…
Thanks to the advances in modern instrumentation we have learned about many exoplanets that span a wide range of masses and composition. Studying their atmospheres provides insight into planetary origin, evolution, dynamics, and…
The closest stars that harbor potentially habitable planets are cool M-stars. Upcoming ground- and space-based telescopes will be able to search the atmosphere of such planets for a range of chemicals. To facilitate this search and to…
This tutorial is an introduction to techniques used to characterize the atmospheres of transiting exoplanets. We intend it to be a useful guide for the undergraduate, graduate student, or postdoctoral scholar who wants to begin research in…
High-resolution spectroscopy studies of ultra-hot Jupiters have been key in our understanding of exoplanet atmospheres. Observing into the atmospheres of these giant planets allows for direct constraints on their atmospheric compositions…
We explore cloudy, extended H2-He atmosphere scenarios for the warm super-Earth GJ 1214b using an optimal estimation retrieval technique. This planet, orbiting an M4.5 star only 13 pc from the Earth, is of particular interest because it…
Determining whether temperate rocky exoplanets orbiting M stars retain atmospheres is currently a central goal of exoplanet astronomy. To this end, the James Webb Space Telescope has begun searching for atmospheres on these worlds with MIRI…
In the last decade, about a dozen giant exoplanets have been directly imaged in the IR as companions to young stars. With photometry and spectroscopy of these planets in hand from new extreme coronagraphic instruments such as SPHERE at VLT…
The high cosmic abundance and the intermediate volatility and chemical properties of sulfur allow the use of sulfur-bearing species as a tracer of the chemical processes in the atmospheres of hot Jupiter exoplanets. Nevertheless, despite…
HD 209458b is the prototypical hot Jupiter and one of the best targets available for precise atmosphere characterisation. Now that spectra from both Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are available, we can…
The recently discovered low-density "super-Earths" Kepler-11b, Kepler-11f, Kepler-11d, Kepler-11e, and planets such as GJ 1214b represent most likely planets which are surrounded by dense H/He envelopes or contain deep H2O oceans also…
Context. High-contrast imaging is currently the only available technique for the study of the thermodynamical and compositional properties of exoplanets in long-period orbits. The SPICES project is a coronagraphic space telescope dedicated…
Atmospheric refraction affects to various degrees exoplanet transit, lunar eclipse, as well as stellar occultation observations. Exoplanet retrieval algorithms often use analytical expressions for the column abundance along a ray traversing…
The population of strongly irradiated Jupiter-sized planets has no equivalent in the Solar System. It is characterised by strongly bloated atmospheres and atmospheric large-scale heights. Recent space-based observations of SO2…
Clouds are ubiquitous in extrasolar planet atmospheres and are critical to our understanding of planetary climate and chemistry. They also represent one of the greater challenges to overcome when trying to interpret transit transmission…
The most productive tracer of exoplanetary atmospheric escape is the measurement of excess absorption in the near-infrared metastable helium triplet during transits. Atmospheric escape of a close-in planet's atmosphere plays a role in its…
Visible and ultraviolet imaging and spectroscopy of Solar System giant planets can set the paradigm for the atmospheric, ionospheric, and magnetospheric processes shaping the diversity of giant exoplanets, brown dwarfs, and their…
There are no planets intermediate in size between Earth and Neptune in our Solar System, yet these objects are found around a substantial fraction of other stars. Population statistics show that close-in planets in this size range bifurcate…