English

Atmospheric retrievals with petitRADTRANS

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2024-04-05 v2 Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Abstract

petitRADTRANS (pRT) is a fast radiative transfer code used for computing emission and transmission spectra of exoplanet atmospheres, combining a FORTRAN back end with a Python based user interface. It is widely used in the exoplanet community with 222 references in the literature to date, and has been benchmarked against numerous similar tools. The spectra calculated with pRT can be used as a forward model for fitting spectroscopic data using Monte Carlo techniques, commonly referred to as an atmospheric retrieval. The new retrieval module combines fast forward modelling with nested sampling codes, allowing for atmospheric retrievals on a large range of different types of exoplanet data. Thus it is now possible to use pRT to easily and quickly infer the atmospheric properties of exoplanets in both transmission and thermal emission.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2309.06755,
  title  = {Atmospheric retrievals with petitRADTRANS},
  author = {Evert Nasedkin and Paul Mollière and Doriann Blain},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.06755},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

5 pages, 1 figure, published in the Journal of Open Source Software

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:20:02.154Z