Related papers: Correcting Exoplanet Transmission Spectra for Stel…
The TRAPPIST-1 planetary system represents an exceptional opportunity for the atmospheric characterization of temperate terrestrial exoplanets with the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Assessing the potential impact of stellar…
Light curves show the flux variation from the target star and its orbiting planets as a function of time. In addition to the transit features created by the planets, the flux also includes the reflected light component of each planet, which…
The properties of inhomogeneities on the surface of active stars (i.e. dark spots and bright faculae) significantly influence the determination of the parameters of an exoplanet. The chromatic effect they have on transmission spectroscopy…
Transmission spectroscopy probes exoplanet atmospheres via the wavelength dependence of transit depths, but stellar contamination from magnetic activity can significantly bias these measurements. Activity-induced changes in the chromatic…
Photometric light curves suffer from fundamental degeneracies that limit surface information recovery. We demonstrate that astrometry enables access to complementary information through photocentre variations induced by rotating surface…
Transmission spectroscopy has proven to be an effective technique for characterizing exoplanet atmospheres. However, transmission spectroscopy requires planetary transits, which occur for only a small fraction of planetary systems due to…
Transmission spectroscopy is a key avenue for the near-term study of small-planet atmospheres and the most promising method when it comes to searching for atmospheres on temperate rocky worlds, which are often too cold for planetary…
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…
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…
One source of error in high-precision radial velocity measurements of exoplanet host stars is chromatic change in Earth's atmospheric transmission during observations. Mitigation of this error requires that the photon-weighted barycentric…
The detection of exoplanets using any method is prone to confusion due to the intrinsic variability of the host star. We investigate the effect of cool starspots on the detectability of the exoplanets around solar-like stars using the…
We re-visit the principles of transmission spectroscopy for transiting extrasolar planets, focusing on the overlap between the planetary spectrum and the illuminating stellar spectrum. Virtually all current models of exoplanetary…
Photospheric velocities and stellar activity features such as spots and faculae produce measurable radial velocity signals that currently obscure the detection of sub-meter-per-second planetary signals. However, photospheric velocities are…
Phase curves, or the change in observed illumination of the planet as it orbits around its host star, help us to characterize their atmospheres. However, the variability of the host star can make their detection challenging: the presence of…
We present a population study of 20 exoplanets, ranging from Neptune-like to inflated hot-Jupiter planets, observed during transit with the STIS and WFC3 instruments aboard the Hubble Space Telescope. To obtain spectral information from the…
Retrieval of exoplanetary atmospheric properties from their transmission spectra commonly assumes that the errors in the data are Gaussian and independent. However, non-Gaussian noise can occur due to instrumental or stellar systematics and…
Astrometric jitter noise arises when starspots on a rotating stellar surface move in and out of view, shifting the photocenter. This noise may limit our ability to detect and weigh small, sub-Neptune-sized planets around active stars. By…
From an observational standpoint, stellar activity poses a critical challenge to exoplanet science, as it inhibits the detection of planets and the precise measurement of their parameters. Radial velocity and transit searches revealed a…
Thanks to the advances in modern instrumentation we have learned about many exoplanets that span a wide range of masses and composition. Studying their atmospheres provides insight into planetary origin, evolution, dynamics, and…
Spectral retrieval has long been a powerful tool for interpreting planetary remote sensing observations. Flexible, parameterised, agnostic models are coupled with inversion algorithms in order to infer atmospheric properties directly from…