Related papers: The Impending Opacity Challenge in Exoplanet Atmos…
The determination of atmospheric structure and molecular abundances of planetary atmospheres via spectroscopy involves direct comparisons between models and data. While varying in sophistication, most model-spectra comparisons fundamentally…
Direct detection, also known as direct imaging, is a method for discovering and characterizing the atmospheres of planets at intermediate and wide separations. It is the only means of obtaining spectra of non-transiting exoplanets.…
Context. Clouds have already been detected in exoplanetary atmospheres. They play crucial roles in a planet's atmosphere and climate and can also create ambiguities in the determination of atmospheric parameters such as trace gas mixing…
Atmospheric regions below a refractive boundary are hidden in limb observations. Refraction thus creates a gray continuum in the planet's transmission spectrum which can hide spectral features associated with sources of atmospheric opacity.…
Transmission spectroscopy provides a window to study exoplanetary atmospheres, but that window is fogged by clouds and hazes. Clouds and haze introduce a degeneracy between the strength of gaseous absorption features and planetary physical…
Inferring the climate and surface conditions of terrestrial exoplanets in the habitable zone is a major goal for the field of exoplanet science. This pursuit will require both statistical analyses of the population of habitable planets as…
The study of extrasolar planets has rapidly expanded to encompass the search for new planets, measurements of sizes and masses, models of planetary interiors, planetary demographics and occurrence frequencies, the characterization of…
Inferring the properties of exoplanets from their atmospheres, while confronting low resolution and low signal-to-noise in the context of the quantities we want to derive, poses rigorous demands upon the data collected from observation.…
In support of the National Acadamies' Exoplanet Science Strategy, this whitepaper outlines key technology challenges for studying the diversity of worlds in the Galaxy and in searching for habitable planets. Observations of habitable…
The complexity of atmospheric retrieval models is largely data-driven and one-dimensional models have generally been considered adequate with current data quality. However, recent studies have suggested that using 1D models in retrievals…
While high-resolution cross-correlation spectroscopy (HRCCS) techniques have proven effective at characterizing the atmospheres of transiting and non-transiting hot Jupiters, the limitations of these techniques are not well understood. We…
The search for biosignatures on exoplanets connects the fields of biology and biochemistry to astronomical observation, with the hope that we might detect evidence of active biological processes on worlds outside the solar system. Here we…
Clouds have an important role in the atmospheres of planetary bodies. It is expected that, like all the planetary bodies in our solar system, exoplanet atmospheres will also have substantial cloud coverage, and evidence is mounting for…
Started approximately in the late 1980s, exoplanetology has up to now unveiled the main gross bulk characteristics of planets and planetary systems. In the future it will benefit from more and more large telescopes and advanced space…
The large number of new planets expected from wide-area transit surveys means that follow-up transmission spectroscopy studies of their atmospheres will be limited by the availability of telescope assets. We argue that telescopes covering a…
Modeling based on differentiable programming holds great promise for astronomy, enabling advanced techniques such as gradient-based posterior sampling and optimization. This paradigm motivated us to develop ExoJAX (Kawahara et al. 2022),…
Exoplanet properties depend on how well the host star is characterized. For instance, the stellar atmospheric parameters (i.e., effective temperature, surface gravity and overall metallicity) are needed to derive the stellar mass and radius…
Nearly 30 years after the discovery of the first exoplanet around a main sequence star, thousands of planets have now been confirmed. These discoveries have completely revolutionized our understanding of planetary systems, revealing types…
The last few years has seen a dramatic increase in the number of exoplanets known and in the range of methods for characterising their atmospheric properties. At the same time, new discoveries of increasingly cooler brown dwarfs have pushed…
Simulated exoplanet transmission spectra are critical for planning and interpretation of observations and to explore the sensitivity of spectral features to atmospheric thermochemical processes. We present a publicly available generic model…