An Open-source Bayesian Atmospheric Radiative Transfer (BART) Code. II. The Transit Radiative Transfer Module and Retrieval of HAT-P-11b

Autor: Patricio E. Cubillos, Joseph Harrington, Jasmina Blecic, Michael D. Himes, Patricio M. Rojo, Thomas J. Loredo, Nate B. Lust, Ryan C. Challener, Austin J. Foster, Madison M. Stemm, Andrew S. D. Foster, Sarah D. Blumenthal
Rok vydání: 2022
Předmět:
Zdroj: The Planetary Science Journal. 3:81
ISSN: 2632-3338
Popis: This and companion papers by Harrington et al. and Blecic et al. present the Bayesian Atmospheric Radiative Transfer (bart) code, an open-source, open-development package to characterize extrasolar planet atmospheres. bart combines a thermochemical equilibrium abundance (tea), a radiative transfer (Transit), and a Bayesian statistical (mc3) module to constrain atmospheric temperatures and molecular abundances for given spectroscopic observations. Here we describe the Transit radiative transfer package, an efficient line-by-line radiative transfer C code for one-dimensional atmospheres, developed by P. Rojo and further modified by the UCF exoplanet group. This code produces transmission and hemisphere-integrated emission spectra. Transit handles line-by-line opacities from HITRAN, Partridge & Schwenke (H2O), Schwenke (TiO), and Plez (VO) and collision-induced absorption from Borysow, HITRAN, and ExoMol. Transit emission spectra models agree with models from C. Morley (private communication) within a few percent. We applied bart to the Spitzer and Hubble transit observations of the Neptune-sized planet HAT-P-11b. Our analysis of the combined HST and Spitzer data generally agrees with those from previous studies, finding atmospheric models with enhanced metallicity (≳100× solar) and high-altitude clouds (≲1 mbar level). When analyzing only the HST data, our models favor high-metallicity atmospheres, in contrast with the previous analysis by Chachan et al. We suspect that this discrepancy arises from the different choice of chemistry modeling (free constant-with-altitude versus thermochemical equilibrium) and the enhanced parameter correlations found when neglecting the Spitzer observations. The bart source code and documentation are available at https://github.com/exosports/BART.
Databáze: OpenAIRE