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Of the over 200 known extrasolar planets, 14 exhibit transits in front of their parent stars as seen from Earth. Spectroscopic observations of the transiting planets can probe the physical conditions of their atmospheres. One such technique…
Transmission spectroscopy of Earth-like exoplanets is a potential tool for habitability screening. Transiting planets are present-day "Rosetta Stones" for understanding extrasolar planets because they offer the possibility to characterize…
It is possible to learn a great deal about exoplanet atmospheres even when we cannot spatially resolve the planets from their host stars. In this chapter, we overview the basic techniques used to characterize transiting exoplanets -…
One of the great quests of astronomy is to obtain the spectrum of a terrestrial planet orbiting within the habitable zone of its star, and the dominant challenge in doing so is to isolate the light of the planet from that of the star.…
Transmission spectroscopy of transiting exoplanets is a proven technique that can yield information on the composition and structure of a planet's atmosphere. However, transmission spectra may be compromised by inhomogeneities in the…
Aims. We used realistic three-dimensional (3D) radiative hydrodynamical (RHD) simulations from the Stagger-grid and synthetic images computed with the radiative transfer code Optim3D to provide interferometric observables to extract the…
The results of large-scale exoplanet transit surveys indicate that the distribution of small planet radii is likely sculpted by atmospheric loss. Several possible physical mechanisms exist for this loss of primordial atmospheres, each of…
Transmission spectroscopy is one of the most successful methods of learning about exoplanet atmospheres. The process of retrievals using transmission spectroscopy consists of creating numerous forward models and comparing them to…
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…
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…
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is predicted to make great advances in the field of exoplanet atmospheres. Its 25 m2 mirror means that it can reach unprecedented levels of precision in observations of transit spectra, and can thus…
Traditionally, ground-based spectrophotometric observations probing transiting exoplanet atmospheres have employed a linear map between comparison and target star light curves (e.g. via differential spectrophotometry) to correct for…
Hyperspectral anomaly detection (HAD), a crucial approach for many civilian and military applications, seeks to identify pixels with spectral signatures that are anomalous relative to a preponderance of background signatures. Significant…
The transit method, during which a planet's presence is inferred by measuring the reduction in flux as it passes in front of its parent star, is a highly successful exoplanet detection and characterization technique. During transit, the…
Exoplanet atmospheres are the key to understanding the nature of exoplanets. To this end, transit spectrophotometry provides us opportunities to investigate the physical properties and chemical compositions of exoplanet atmospheres. We aim…
Binarity is often invoked to explain peculiarities that can not be explained by the standard theory of stellar evolution. Detecting orbital motion via the Doppler effect is the best method to test binarity when direct imaging is not…
The ability to observe extrasolar planets transiting their stars has profoundly changed our understanding of these planetary systems. However, these measurements depend on how well we understand the properties of the host star, such as…
We highlight a physical effect that is often not considered that impacts the calculation of model spectra of planets at secondary eclipse, affecting both emission and reflection spectra. The radius of the emitting surface of the planet is…
We modeled the transit signatures in the Lya line of a putative Earth-sized planet orbiting in the HZ of the M dwarf GJ436. We estimated the transit depth in the Lya line for an exo-Earth with three types of atmospheres: a…
Sophisticated atmospheric retrieval algorithms, such as Nested Sampling, explore large parameter spaces by iterating over millions of radiative transfer (RT) calculations. Probability distribution functions for retrieved parameters are…