Transmission spectra of multi-dimensional atmospheric simulations: computation and applications -- Aurelien Falco
Atmospheric retrievals (the inference of atmospheric characteristics such as the pressure and temperature of an exoplanet from an observed spectrum) often rely on a 1D representation of the atmospheres of exoplanets. This simplification is motivated by the low computational requirements of the computation of transmission spectra for 1D atmospheric simulations. This allows us to run such forward models a number of times sufficiently large to use a Bayesian method for the retrieval in question. However, the 1D simplification has been shown to introduce some biases in the case of Ultra Hot Jupiters for example.
These biases have been shown using a 3D model. We present here a general framework to compute transmission spectra of 1D, 2D or 3D atmospheric simulations using Pytmosph3R, and TauREx (which has been extended to a 2D model for our convenience). We compare these models and study their convergence, discuss their performance, and show possible applications of multi-dimensional forward models.