GOLDILOCKS AND THE 1000+ PLANETS. Towards characterization of atmospheres | Camilla Danielski ( Institut d’astrophysique spatiale (IAS), Paris – France )

In less than two decades, the field of exoplanetary science has undergone nothing short of a revolution. We have gone from the oddball discovery of a “planetary sized object” orbiting a pulsar star (Wolszczan and Frail, 1992) to efficient and systematic all-sky surveys with one thousand confirmed exoplanets and over three thousand candidates awaiting confirmation (Batalha et al., 2013). With such wealth of systems discovered, the next step in exoplanet research is to characterise the properties of these systems. One way of doing so is by measuring the chemical and thermal make-up of their atmospheres. In this seminar I will give an overview of what we know about these foreign worlds, the current techniques used and discuss the difficulties faced when having to reach the required photometric accuracy of 10^-4 over the duration of several hours. In the figure: the 0.3 – 2.4 micron spectrum of HD-189733b including all the high-precision measurements available in the literature. If the datapoints are observed simultaneously they are plotted with the same colour. Important to stress that combining multi-epoch dataset is a risky operation: instrumental systematics and stellar activity may prevent altogether an accurate measurement of the absolute transit depth.