Related papers: Radiative Transfer for Exoplanet Atmospheres
Robust atmospheric and radiative transfer modeling will be required to properly interpret reflected light and thermal emission spectra of terrestrial exoplanets. This will help break observational degeneracies between the numerous…
Exoplanet atmospheric retrieval is a computational technique widely used to infer properties of planetary atmospheres from remote spectroscopic observations. Retrieval codes typically employ Bayesian sampling algorithms or machine learning…
Multi-wavelength transit and secondary-eclipse light-curve observations are some of the most powerful techniques to probe the thermo-chemical properties of exoplanets. Although the large planet-to-star brightness contrast and few available…
Transmission spectroscopy during planetary transits is expected to be a major source of information on the atmospheres of small (approximately Earth-sized) exoplanets in the next two decades. This technique, however, is intrinsically…
Future telescopes will characterize rocky exoplanets in reflected light, revealing their albedo, which depends on surface, cloud, and atmospheric properties. Identifying these features is crucial for assessing habitability. We present…
Inverse techniques are used to extract information about an exoplanet's atmosphere. These techniques are prone to biased results if the appropriate forward model is not used. One assumption used in a forward model is to assume that the…
Observations of exoplanet transit spectra are essential to understanding the physics and chemistry of distant worlds. The effects of opacity sources and many physical processes combine to set the shape of a transit spectrum. Two such key…
A key to understand exoplanets is characterisation of their host stars. One of the most powerful tools to characterise stellar properties like effective temperature, surface gravity and metallicity, is spectroscopy based on observations of…
With the increasing number of directly imaged giant exoplanets the current atmosphere models are often not capable of fully explaining the spectra and luminosity of the sources. A particularly challenging component of the atmosphere models…
We present the easy-to-use, publicly available, Python package petitRADTRANS, built for the spectral characterization of exoplanet atmospheres. The code is fast, accurate, and versatile; it can calculate both transmission and emission…
We review several aspects of the calculation of exoplanet model atmospheres in the current era, with a focus on understanding the temperature-pressure profiles of atmospheres and their emitted spectra. Most of the focus is on gas giant…
We present a sequence of toy models for irradiated planet atmospheres, in which the effects of geometry and energy redistribution are modelled self-consistently. We use separate but coupled grey atmosphere models to treat the ingoing…
The study of exoplanetary atmospheres is one of the most exciting and dynamic frontiers in astronomy. Over the past two decades ongoing surveys have revealed an astonishing diversity in the planetary masses, radii, temperatures, orbital…
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…
It has been shown that spectroscopy of transiting extrasolar planets can potentially provide a wealth of information about their atmospheres. Herein, we set up the inverse problem in spectroscopic retrieval. We use non-linear optimal…
Spectroscopic observations of exoplanet atmospheres can reveal the chemical composition, temperature, cloud properties, and (potentially) the habitability of these distant worlds. The inference of such properties is generally enabled by…
Accurate radiative transfer coefficients (emissivities, absorptivities, and rotativities) are needed for modeling radiation from relativistically hot, magnetized plasmas such as those found in Event Horizon Telescope sources. Here we…
Transmission spectroscopy is a key technique in the characterization of exoplanet atmospheres and has been widely applied to planets undergoing hydrodynamic escape. While a robust analytic theory exists for transmission spectra of…
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will enable the search for and characterization of terrestrial exoplanet atmospheres in the habitable zone via transmission spectroscopy. However, relatively little work has been done to use solar…
Solar System observations that serve as analogs for exoplanet remote sensing data can provide important opportunities to validate ideas and models related to exoplanet environments. Critically, and unlike true exoplanet observations, Solar…