Related papers: A new statistical method for characterizing the at…
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 studies of exoplanet atmospheres using transmission spectroscopy, Bayesian retrievals are the most popular form of analysis. In these procedures it is common to adopt a Gaussian likelihood. However, this implicitly assumes that the upper…
What makes the study of exoplanetary atmospheres so hard is the extraction of its tiny signal from observations, usually dominated by telluric absorption, stellar spectrum and instrumental noise. The High Resolution Spectroscopy has emerged…
The probability of the detection of Earth-like exoplanets may increase in the near future after the launch of the space missions using the transit photometry as observation method. By using this technique only the semi-major axis of the…
This chapter reviews the current state of observational and theoretical efforts in the characterization of exoplanet atmospheres, with a focus on developments enabled through the Swiss National Centre for Competence in Research (NCCR)…
Eclipsing binaries provide one of the most direct mechanisms for measuring stellar properties such as mass and radius, but historically, determining these properties has been non-trivial and computationally prohibitive. As such, only a…
Time-series photometry and spectroscopy of transiting exoplanets allow us to study their atmospheres. Unfortunately, the required precision to extract atmospheric information surpasses the design specifications of most general purpose…
Correct distributions of extrasolar systems for their orbital parameters (semi-major axes, period, eccentricity) and physical characteristics (mass, spectral type of parent star) are received. Orbital resonances in extrasolar systems are…
We investigate a new approach to the detection of companions to extrasolar planets beyond the transit method. We discuss the possibility of the existence of binary planets. We develop a method based on the imaging of a planet-companion as…
Spectral analysis is a powerful tool to investigate stellar properties and it has been widely used for decades now. However, the methods considered to perform this kind of analysis are mostly based on iteration among a few diagnostic lines…
With a scheduled launch in October 2018, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is expected to revolutionise the field of atmospheric characterization of exoplanets. The broad wavelength coverage and high sensitivity of its instruments will…
We use a model of aerosol microphysics to investigate the impact of high-altitude photochemical aerosols on the transmission spectra and atmospheric properties of close-in exoplanets, such as HD209458b and HD189733b. The results depend…
The characteristics of irradiated solar system planetary atmospheres have been studied for decades, consequently modern planetary science benefits from an exhaustive body of ground- and space-based data. The study of extrasolar planetary…
I present an homogeneous determination of the physical properties of 14 transiting extrasolar planetary systems for which good data are available. The input quantities for each system are the results of the light curve analyses (Paper 1),…
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…
Since 2008 we have run an observational program to accurately measure the characteristics of known exoplanet systems hosting close-in transiting giant planets, i.e. hot Jupiters. Our study is based on high-quality photometric follow-up…
The detection of massive planets orbiting nearby stars has become almost routine, but current techniques are as yet unable to detect terrestrial planets with masses comparable to the Earth's. Future space-based observatories to detect…
Tremendous progress in the science of extrasolar planets has been achieved since the discovery of a Jupiter orbiting the nearby Sun-like star 51 Pegasi in 1995. Theoretical models have now reached enough maturity to predict the…
Spectra of exoplanet atmospheres provide us the opportunity to improve our understanding of these objects just as remote sensing in our own solar system has increased our understanding of the solar system bodies. The challenge is to…
The characterization of exoplanetary atmospheres has come of age in the last decade, as astronomical techniques now allow for albedos, chemical abundances, temperature profiles and maps, rotation periods and even wind speeds to be measured.…