Exoplanetary Atmospheres

In the last decade, thousands of exoplanets have been discovered with dedicated space and ground based instruments, revealing a wide range of planet sizes a masses. Some of them orbit their host stars in the habitable zone, whilst others are close enough to complete an orbit in just a few days or hours.

High resolution transmission and emission spectroscopy in the primary transit and secondary eclipse of an exoplanet have proven to be very useful for obtaining information of the atmospheres of these exoplanets. In the GAPT, we are currently analyzing measurements from instruments such as CARMENES in the Calar Alto Observatory-CAHA (Almería, Spain) using the High Dispersion Spectroscopy technique, based on the cross-correlation of the data with the synthetic exo-atmospheric transmission models that we produce (see, e.g., Alonso-Floriano, Sánchez-López et al., 2019).

In addition, one of our objectives is to prepare for the next generation of ground-based high-resolution spectrographs (e.g., METIS (2.9-5.3 µm) @ E-ELT) and the James Webb Space Telescope (NIRSpec and MIRI (0.6-24 µm), R~3000). These future facilities will provide measurements of unprecedented precision that will allow us to push the investigation of exo-atmospheres further by simultaneously analyzing ground-based and space spectra.