Related papers: A new powerful method for probing the atmospheres …
We investigate the effect of planetary rotation on the transit spectrum of an extrasolar giant planet. During ingress and egress, absorption features arising from the planet's atmosphere are Doppler shifted by of order the planet's…
The detection of extrasolar planets' atmospheres requires very demanding observations. For planets that can not be spatially separated from their host stars, i.e. the vast majority of planets, the transiting planets are the only ones…
Using the new Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) on the {\it Hubble Space Telescope (HST)}, we obtained moderate-resolution, high signal/noise ultraviolet spectra of HD 209458 and its exoplanet HD 209458b during transit, both orbital…
During primary transits, the spectral signatures of an exoplanet atmosphere can be measured using transmission spectroscopy. The goal of this work is to accurately measure the atomspheric sodium absorption light curve in HD189733b,…
High-resolution Doppler spectroscopy provides an avenue to study the atmosphere of both transiting and non-transiting planets. This powerful method has also yielded some of the most robust atmospheric detections to date. Currently,…
Due to stellar rotation, the observed radial velocity of a star varies during the transit of a planet across its surface, a phenomenon known as the Rossiter-McLaughlin (RM) effect. The amplitude of the RM effect is related to the radius of…
The recent transit observation of HD 209458 b - an extrasolar planet orbiting a sun-like star - confirmed that it is a gas giant and determined that its orbital inclination is 85 degrees. This inclination makes possible investigations of…
[Context] The first detection of an atmosphere around an extrasolar planet was presented by Charbonneau and collaborators in 2002. In the optical transmission spectrum of the transiting exoplanet HD209458b, an absorption signal from sodium…
The characterization of exoplanetary atmospheres via transit spectroscopy is based on the comparison between the stellar spectrum filtered through the atmosphere and the unadulterated spectrum from the occulted stellar region. The…
Observations of stellar surfaces - except for the Sun - are hampered by their tiny angular extent, while observed spectral lines are smeared by averaging over the stellar surface, and by stellar rotation. Exoplanet transits can be used to…
We propose a method for observing transiting exoplanets with near-infrared high-resolution spectrometers. We aim to create a robust data analysis method for recovering atmospheric transmission spectra from transiting exoplanets over a wide…
High-resolution transmission spectroscopy is a method for understanding the chemical and physical properties of upper exoplanetary atmospheres. Due to large absorption cross-sections, resonance lines of atomic sodium D-lines (at 5889.95…
The nearby transiting planet HD 189733b was observed during three transits with the ACS camera of the Hubble Space Telescope in spectroscopic mode. The resulting time series of 675 spectra covers the 550-1050 nm range, with a resolution…
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…
Context: Several studies have so far placed useful constraints on planetary atmospheric properties using transmission spectrsocopy, and in the case of HD209458b even the radial velocity of the planet during the transit event has been…
Context: Since the first exoplanetary atmosphere detection using the Hubble Space Telescope, characterization of exoplanet atmospheres from the ground have been playing an increasingly important role in the analysis of such atmospheres…
Atomic hydrogen escaping from the planet HD209458b provides the largest observational signature ever detected for an extrasolar planet atmosphere. However, the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) used in previous observational…
Exoplanetary transmission spectroscopy in the near-infrared using Hubble/NICMOS is currently ambiguous because different observational groups claim different results from the same data, depending on their analysis methodologies. Spatial…
Measuring the albedo of an extrasolar planet provides insights into its atmospheric composition and its global thermal properties, including heat dissipation and weather patterns. Such a measurement requires very precise photometry of a…
Transiting exoplanets provide detailed access to their atmospheres, as the planet's signal can be effectively separated from that of its host star. For transiting exoplanets three fundamental atmospheric measurements are possible:…