2012/12/20 by Joanna K. Barstow, J. K. Barstow, Barstow, Joanna K. +14 · 1 citation
Chemistry · Earth and Planetary Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #Atmospheric Ozone and Climate #Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP) #FOS: Physical sciences #Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM) #Spectroscopy and Laser Applications #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph.EP #astro-ph.IM
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1212.5020
22 pages, 30 figures, 4 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRAS
arxiv created 2012/12/20 · openalex publication_date 2012/12/20 · arxiv updated 2012/12/21 · openalex created_date 2022/10/01 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Space telescopes such as EChO (Exoplanet Characterisation Observatory) and JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) will be important for the future study of extrasolar planet atmospheres. Both of these missions are capable of performing high sensitivity spectroscopic measurements at moderate resolutions in the visible and infrared, which will allow the characterisation of atmospheric properties using primary and secondary transit spectroscopy. We use the NEMESIS radiative transfer and retrieval tool (Irwin et al. 2008, Lee et al. 2012) to explore the potential of the proposed EChO mission to solve the retrieval problem for a range of H2-He planets orbiting different stars. We find that EChO should be capable of retrieving temperature structure to ~200 K precision and detecting H2O, CO2 and CH4 from a single eclipse measurement for a hot Jupiter orbiting a Sun-like star and a hot Neptune orbiting an M star, also providing upper limits on CO and NH3. We provide a table of retrieval precisions for these quantities in each test case. We expect around 30 Jupiter-sized planets to be observable by EChO; hot Neptunes orbiting M dwarfs are rarer, but we anticipate observations of at least one similar planet.