Related papers: Breaking degeneracies in exoplanetary parameters t…
The increasing precision of planetary mass and radius observations is bringing major questions about the structure and formation of planets--such as the nature of the radius valley and origin of super-Mercuries--within reach, demanding the…
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 -…
The Mid-Infrared instrument (MIRI) on board the James Webb Space Telescope will perform the first ever characterization of young giant exoplanets observed by direct imaging in the 5-28 microns spectral range. This wavelength range is key…
We present a uniform assessment of existing near-infrared Spitzer Space Telescope observations of planet-bearing stars. Using a simple four-parameter blackbody thermal model, we analyze stars for which photometry in at least one of…
Context. The atmosphere of exoplanets has been studied extensively in recent years, using numerical models to retrieve chemical composition, dynamical circulation or temperature from data. One of the best observational probes in…
Irradiated brown dwarfs (BDs) provide natural laboratories to test our understanding of substellar and irradiated atmospheres. A handful of short-period BDs around white dwarfs (WDs) have been observed, but the uniquely intense UV-dominated…
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.…
This article provides an overview of how models of giant planet interiors are constructed. We review measurements from past space missions that provide constraints for the interior structure of Jupiter. We discuss typical three-layer…
We use a model of aerosol microphysics to investigate the impact of high-altitude photochemical aerosols on the transmission spectra and atmospheric properties of close-in exoplanets, such as HD209458b and HD189733b. The results depend…
High-resolution optical spectroscopy during the transit of HD 189733b, a prototypical hot Jupiter, allowed the resolution of the Na I D sodium lines in the planet, giving access to the extreme conditions of the planet upper atmosphere. We…
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…
Directly-imaged exoplanets are unexplored laboratories for the application of the spectral and temperature retrieval method, where the chemistry and composition of their atmospheres are inferred from inverse modeling of the available data.…
Astrophysical observations reveal a large diversity of radii and masses of exoplanets. It is important to characterize the interiors of exoplanets to understand planetary diversity and further determine how unique, or not, Earth is.…
High-resolution optical spectroscopy is a powerful tool to characterise exoplanetary atmospheres from the ground. The sodium D lines, with their large cross sections, are especially suited to study the upper layers of atmospheres in this…
It has long been understood that the light curve of a transiting planet constrains the density of its host star. That fact is routinely used to improve measurements of the stellar surface gravity and has been argued to be an independent…
Exoplanets in the ultra-hot Jupiter regime provide an excellent laboratory for testing the impact of stellar irradiation on the dynamics and chemical composition of gas giant atmospheres. In this study, we observed two transits of the…
Sub-Neptunes represent the largest exoplanet demographic, yet their bulk compositions remain poorly understood. Recent studies suggested that only very cold planets, such as Uranus and Neptune, could experience stratification of volatiles…
Several short-period Jupiter-mass planets have been discovered around nearby solar-type stars. During the circularization of their orbits, the dissipation of tidal disturbance by their host stars heats the interior and inflates the sizes of…
The study of temperate sub-Neptunes is the new frontier in exoplanetary science. A major development in the past year has been the first detection of carbon-bearing molecules in the atmosphere of a temperate sub-Neptune, K2-18 b, a possible…
We propose a new data analysis method for obtaining transmission spectra of exoplanet atmospheres and brightness variation across the stellar disk from transit observations. The new method is capable of recovering exoplanet atmosphere…