Understanding the Atmospheres of Transiting Extrasolar Planets

Details Understanding the Atmospheres of Transiting Extrasolar Planets Understanding the Atmospheres of Transiting Extrasolar Planets

May 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...21010603b&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society Meeting 210, #106.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.231

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Transiting planets, those which just happen to lie in near edge-on orbits and pass periodically between Earth and their parent star, are quite rare. Of those discovered so far, only a few have been found within 100 pc. These objects are critically important for understanding extrasolar planets, given the variety of observational approaches that are made available by their transiting nature.
The non-grey opacities in a planet's atmosphere lead to wavelength-dependent light-curve eclipse depths as the planet passes in front of the star (primary eclipse). Multi-wavelength observations during primary eclipse, therefore, directly probe the chemistry along the day-night transition region of transiting planet atmospheres. As a planet passes behind its star (secondary eclipse), the additional faint IR flux from the planet temporarily disappears allowing one to measure the mean planet-star flux density ratio across the planet's dayside. In this talk, infrared observations of the handful of nearby transiting planets (from Spitzer and HST) will be discussed. The emphasis will be on the agreement and disagreement between these observations and recent theoretical models, in particular regarding the basic atmospheric chemical composition and temperature structure. This research is supported by the NASA Origins of Solar System program and the Spitzer Theory program.

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