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One of the outstanding goals of the planetary science community is to measure the present-day atmospheric composition of planets and link this back to formation. As giant planets are formed by accreting gas, ices, and rocks, constraining…
Refractory elements such as iron, magnesium, and silicon can be detected in the atmospheres of ultrahot giant planets. This provides an opportunity to quantify the amount of refractory material accreted during formation, along with volatile…
With dayside temperatures elevated enough for all atmospheric constituents to be present in gas form, ultra-hot Jupiters offer a unique opportunity to probe the composition of giant planets. We aim to infer the composition and thermal…
Deciphering the role of clouds is central to our understanding of exoplanet atmospheres, as they have a direct impact on the temperature and pressure structure, and observational properties of the planet. Super-hot Jupiters occupy a…
The temperature profile of a planetary atmosphere is a key diagnostic of radiative and dynamical processes governing the absorption, redistribution, and emission of energy. Observations have revealed dayside stratospheres that either cool…
The temperature of an atmosphere decreases with increasing altitude, unless a shortwave absorber exists that causes a temperature inversion. Ozone plays this role in the Earth`s atmosphere. In the atmospheres of highly irradiated…
We present one of the most precise emission spectra of an exoplanet observed so far. We combine five secondary eclipses of the hot Jupiter WASP-18 b (Tday=2900K) that we secured between 1.1 and 1.7 micron with the WFC3 instrument aboard the…
Ultra-hot giant exoplanets receive thousands of times Earth's insolation. Their high-temperature atmospheres (>2,000 K) are ideal laboratories for studying extreme planetary climates and chemistry. Daysides are predicted to be cloud-free,…
The elemental compositions of exoplanets encode information about their formation environments and internal structures. While volatile ratios such as carbon-to-oxygen (C/O) are used to trace formation location, the rock-forming elements -…
As an exoplanet transits its host star, some of the light from the star is absorbed by the atoms and molecules in the planet's atmosphere, causing the planet to seem bigger; plotting the planet's observed size as a function of the…
The abundances of major carbon and oxygen bearing gases in the atmospheres of giant exoplanets provide insights into atmospheric chemistry and planet formation processes. Thermochemistry suggests that methane should be the dominant…
Aerosols have been found to be nearly ubiquitous in substellar atmospheres. The precise temperature at which these aerosols begin to form in exoplanets has yet to be observationally constrained. Theoretical models and observations of muted…
Elemental abundance studies of solar twin stars suggest that the solar chemical composition contains signatures of the formation of terrestrial planets in the solar system, namely small but significant depletions of the refractory elements.…
A primary goal of exoplanet characterization is to use a planet's current composition to understand how that planet formed. For example, the C/O ratio has long been recognized as carrying important information on the chemistry of volatile…
Infrared radiation emitted from a planet contains information about the chemical composition and vertical temperature profile of its atmosphere. If upper layers are cooler than lower layers, molecular gases will produce absorption features…
Observations of WASP-121 b have suggested an under-abundance of titanium and titanium-oxide from its terminator region. In this study, we aim to determine whether this depletion is global by investigating the day-side emission spectrum. We…
The accretion of icy and rocky solids during the formation of a gas giant planet is poorly constrained and challenging to model. Refractory species, like sulfur, are only present in solids in the protoplanetary disk where planets form.…
The atmospheres of ultra-hot Jupiters are unique compared to other planets because of the presence of both refractory and volatile gaseous species, enabling a new lens to constrain a planet's composition, chemistry, and formation. WASP-178b…
A new class of exoplanets has emerged: the ultra hot Jupiters, the hottest close-in gas giants. Most of them have weaker than expected spectral features in the $1.1-1.7\mu m$ bandpass probed by HST/WFC3 but stronger spectral features at…
Using high-quality spectra of the twin stars in the XO-2 binary system, we have detected significant differences in the chemical composition of their photospheres. The differences correlate strongly with the elements' dust condensation…