Related papers: Self-luminous and irradiated exoplanetary atmosphe…
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…
Over the last decade, exoplanetary transmission spectra have yielded an unprecedented understanding about the physical and chemical nature of planets outside our solar system. Physical and chemical knowledge is mainly extracted via fitting…
Hot Jupiters are very good targets for transmission spectroscopy analysis. Their atmospheres have a large scale height implying a high signal to noise ratio. As these planets orbit close to their stars, they often present strong thermal and…
Ultra-hot Jupiters (UHJs) undergo intense irradiation by their host stars and are expected to experience non-local thermodynamic equilibrium (NLTE) effects in their atmospheres. Such effects are computationally intensive to model but, at…
To date, the ability for observers to reveal the composition or thermal structure of an exoplanet's atmosphere has rested on two techniques: high-contrast direct imaging and time-series observations of transiting exoplanets. The former is…
The absorption signals of metastable He in HD 209458b and several other exoplanets can be explained via escaping atmosphere model with a subsolar He/H ratio. The low abundance of helium can be a result of planet formation if there is a…
Modeling the atmospheres of exoplanets is fundamental to understanding their atmospheric physics and chemical processes. While one-dimensional (1D) atmospheric models with 1D radiative transfer (RT) have been widely used, advances in…
Atmospheric retrievals are now a standard tool to analyze observations of exoplanet atmospheres. This data-driven approach quantitatively compares atmospheric models to observations in order to estimate atmospheric properties and their…
Atmospheres above lava-ocean planets (LOPs) hold clues as to the properties of their interiors, owing to the expectation that the two reservoirs are in chemical equilibrium. Here we consider `mineral' atmospheres produced in equilibrium…
Exoplanets that reside close to their host stars, and therefore receive substantial amounts of X-ray and ultraviolet radiation, are prone to suffer from strong atmospheric escape. This can lead to the creation of an envelope of escaping gas…
We present high resolution transmission spectra of giant planet atmospheres from a coupled 3-D atmospheric dynamics and transmission spectrum model that includes Doppler shifts which arise from winds and planetary motion. We model jovian…
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…
Many of the exoplanets for which we can obtain the highest SNR transit spectra are tidally locked. The atmospheres on tidally-locked planets likely exhibit large differences between the day and night side of the planet, the poles, and the…
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…
Planet formation occurs within the same molecular cloud as the host star, suggesting a link between the elemental abundances of star and the planet. Exoplanet atmosphere studies often assume solar abundances for host stars, however,…
Many evolutionary models of giant exoplanets still rely on simplifying assumptions that are no longer adequate given detailed constraints from Jupiter, Saturn, and modern exoplanet observations. Here, we identify the key physical…
The spectrum of an exoplanet reveals the physical, chemical, and biological processes that have shaped its history and govern its future. However, observations of exoplanet spectra are complicated by the overwhelming glare of their host…
Our ability to observe, detect, and characterize exoplanetary atmospheres has grown by leaps and bounds over the last 20 years, aided largely by developments in astronomical instrumentation; improvements in data analysis techniques; and an…
High-resolution spectra of some chemically peculiar stars clearly demonstrate the presence of strong abundance gradients in their atmospheres. However, these inhomogeneities are usually ignored in the standard scheme of model atmosphere…
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…