Related papers: Understanding Exoplanet Habitability: A Bayesian M…
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 -…
Atmospheric retrievals (AR) characterize exoplanets by estimating atmospheric parameters from observed light spectra, typically by framing the task as a Bayesian inference problem. However, traditional approaches such as nested sampling are…
We explore the efficacy of machine learning (ML) in characterizing exoplanets into different classes. The source of the data used in this work is University of Puerto Rico's Planetary Habitability Laboratory's Exoplanets Catalog (PHL-EC).…
Exoplanet atmospheric retrieval is a computational technique widely used to infer properties of planetary atmospheres from remote spectroscopic observations. Retrieval codes typically employ Bayesian sampling algorithms or machine learning…
With a new generation of observatories coming online this decade, the process of characterizing exoplanet atmospheres will need to be reinvented. Currently mostly on the instrumental side, characterization bottlenecks will soon stand by the…
The most productive tracer of exoplanetary atmospheric escape is the measurement of excess absorption in the near-infrared metastable helium triplet during transits. Atmospheric escape of a close-in planet's atmosphere plays a role in its…
Over the last decade, exoplanetary transmission spectra have yielded an unprecedented understanding about the physical and chemical nature of planets outside our solar system. Physical and chemical knowledge is mainly extracted via fitting…
The occurrence of a planet transiting in front of its host star offers the opportunity to observe the planet's atmosphere filtering starlight. The fraction of occulted stellar flux is roughly proportional to the optically thick area of the…
With the growing number of spectroscopic observations and observational platforms capable of exoplanet atmospheric characterization, there is a growing need for analysis techniques that can distill information about a large population of…
With manual searching processes, the rate at which scientists and astronomers discover exoplanets is slow because of inefficiencies that require an extensive time of laborious inspections. In fact, as of now there have been about only 5,000…
Over the past three decades, exoplanet research has delivered an extensive census of planets spanning a wide range of masses, sizes, and orbital configurations. Despite this progress, the physical interpretation of these populations remains…
Clouds are ubiquitous in extrasolar planet atmospheres and are critical to our understanding of planetary climate and chemistry. They also represent one of the greater challenges to overcome when trying to interpret transit transmission…
Much of the focus of exoplanet atmosphere analysis in the coming decade will be atinfrared wavelengths, with the planned launches of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST). However,…
The classical picture of our Solar System being the archetypal outcome of planet formation has been rendered obsolete by the astonishing diversity of extrasolar-system architectures. From rare hot-Jupiters to abundant super-Earths and…
Transiting exoplanet atmospheric characterization is currently in a golden age as dozens of exoplanet atmospheres are being studied by NASA's Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes. This trend is expected to continue with NASA's Pandora…
Producing optimized and accurate transmission spectra of exoplanets from telescope data has traditionally been a manual and labor-intensive procedure. Here we present the results of the first attempt to improve and standardize this…
I review the major open science questions in exoplanet atmospheres. These are mainly focused in the areas of understanding atmospheric physics, the atmosphere as a window into other realms of planetary physics, and the atmosphere is a…
With the increasing number of directly imaged giant exoplanets the current atmosphere models are often not capable of fully explaining the spectra and luminosity of the sources. A particularly challenging component of the atmosphere models…
CONTEXT: High-precision stellar analyses require hydrodynamic modeling to interpret chemical abundances or oscillation modes. Exoplanet atmosphere studies require stellar background spectra to be known along the transit path while detection…
Constraining planet formation based on the atmospheric composition of exoplanets is a fundamental goal of the exoplanet community. Existing studies commonly try to constrain atmospheric abundances, or to analyze what abundance patterns a…