Speaker
Description
Exoplanets of approximately the size of Jupiter but with an orbital distance to their host star even closer than Mercury is to the Sun are called Hot Jupiters. Due to the intense radiation they receive from their host star, they have high temperatures of hundreds to even thousands degrees Kelvin, and the chemical composition of their atmosphere is strongly influenced by the effects of photo- chemistry. Transmission spectroscopy is a powerful tool to retrieve mixing ratios of molecular species in hot Jupiter atmospheres, and from that to extract key physical information. Unfortunately, due to the high computational expense of calculating photochemistry it is not possible to take the effects of this process into account in retrievals. In this talk, we present the case of photochemically produced SO2 to show how this can lead to large inaccuracies in the retrieved parameters. Subsequently, we use the ARCIS retrieval code to introduce a way to include a parameterized treatment of photochemistry in the retrievals, which allows us to extract more accurate physical information from the spectrum.
