Radiation Spectroscopy Essay

Since the first planet orbiting a star other than our Sun was discovered almost 20 years ago, astronomers have detected over 3,000 exoplanets. Going forward, exoplanetary scientists have two major goals: detecting smaller, more Earth-like planets, and characterizing particular planets of interest. With the advent of the extremely large telescope (ELT) era soon approaching, these two goals will become increasingly intertwined as better instruments give us the power to study the atmospheres of smaller, potentially habitable planets. In the meantime we can look at the brightest targets, typically Jupiter-sized planets in close-orbits, i.e. “hot Jupiters,” with current ground-based telescopes. I propose to develop a ground-breaking technique that uses optical high-resolution spectroscopy to study the atmospheric properties of other worlds, including their composition, structure (e.g. clouds and stratospheres), and dynamics (e.g. global wind patterns and rotation …show more content…
3,5,6…]. Using a CCF with a binary mask stacks together all spectral lines from the mask identified in the spectra into a single average spectral line, with a S/N increase proportional to the number of lines. Recently, application of the CCF to optical high-resolution spectra of the hot Jupiter 51 Peg b led to a tentative detection of the reflected stellar light from the planetary atmosphere, but the oddly large radius and unexpectedly high albedo derived by Martins et al. raised uncertainty that requires further investigation into this technique (2015). Testing this approach on other bright targets with different instruments should lead to a better understanding of the albedo properties of these