Related papers: Prospects for Characterizing the Haziest Sub-Neptu…
The nearby transiting planet HD 189733b was observed during three transits with the ACS camera of the Hubble Space Telescope in spectroscopic mode. The resulting time series of 675 spectra covers the 550-1050 nm range, with a resolution…
Photochemical hazes are suspected to obscure molecular features, such as water, from detection in the transmission spectra of exoplanets with atmospheric temperatures < 800 K. The opacities of laboratory produced organic compounds (tholins)…
Measuring the atmospheric composition of hazy sub-Neptunes like GJ~1214b through transmission spectroscopy is difficult because of the degeneracy between mean molecular weight and haziness. It has been proposed that phase curve observations…
Sub-Neptune planets with radii smaller than Neptune (3.9 Re) are the most common type of planet known to exist in The Milky Way, even though they are absent in the Solar System. These planets can potentially have a large diversity of…
Recently, properties of exoplanet atmospheres have been constrained via multi-wavelength transit observation, which measures an apparent decrease in stellar brightness during planetary transit in front of its host star (called transit…
Of the many recently discovered worlds orbiting distant stars, very little is yet known of their chemical composition. With the arrival of new transit spectroscopy and direct imaging facilities, the question of molecular detectability as a…
GJ 1214b is the most studied sub-Neptune exoplanet to date. Recent measurements have shown its near-infrared transmission spectrum to be flat, pointing to a high-altitude opacity source in the exoplanet's atmosphere, either equilibrium…
We present an investigation of the transmission spectrum of the 6.5 M_earth planet GJ1214b based on new ground-based observations of transits of the planet in the optical and near-infrared, and on previously published data. Observations…
Using forward models for representative exoplanet atmospheres and a radiometric instrument model, we have generated synthetic observational data to explore how well the major C- and O-bearing chemical species (CO, CO2, CH4, and H2O),…
Recent observations of the super-Earth GJ 1214b show that it has a relatively featureless transmission spectrum. One suggestion is that these observations indicate that the planet's atmosphere is vertically compact, perhaps due to a…
High-resolution spectroscopy (HRS) has grown into one of the main techniques to characterise the atmospheres of extrasolar planets. High spectral resolving power allows for the efficient removal of telluric and host-star contamination.…
Atmospheric characterisation of temperate, rocky planets is the holy grail of exoplanet studies. These worlds are at the limits of our capabilities with current instrumentation in transmission spectroscopy and challenge our state-of-the-art…
Direct imaging of exoplanets presents a formidable technical challenge owing to the small angular separation and high contrast between exoplanets and their host stars. High Dispersion Coronagraphy (HDC) is a pathway to achieve unprecedented…
High-resolution Doppler spectroscopy provides an avenue to study the atmosphere of both transiting and non-transiting planets. This powerful method has also yielded some of the most robust atmospheric detections to date. Currently,…
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…
We investigate the detectability of atmospheric spectral features of Earth-like planets in the habitable zone (HZ) around M dwarfs with the future James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). We use a coupled 1D climate-chemistry-model to simulate…
Ground-based high-resolution transmission spectroscopy has emerged as a promising technique for detecting chemicals in transiting exoplanetary atmospheres. Despite chemical inferences in several exoplanets and previous robustness studies, a…
Precise atmospheric observations have been made for a growing sample of warm Neptunes. Here we investigate the correlations between these observations and a large number of system parameters to show that, at 95% confidence, the amplitude of…
Recent surveys have revealed that planets intermediate in size between Earth and Neptune ("super-Earths") are among the most common planets in the Galaxy. Atmospheric studies are the next step toward developing a comprehensive understanding…
Molecular species in planetary atmospheres provide key insights into their atmospheric processes and formation conditions. In recent years, high-resolution Doppler spectroscopy in the near-infrared has allowed detections of H$_2$O and CO in…