TauREx3 PhaseCurve: A 1.5D model for phase curve description

TL;DR

This paper introduces TauREx3 PhaseCurve, a semi-analytical 1.5D model for efficiently simulating exoplanet emission spectra at various phase angles, facilitating future atmospheric retrievals from phase curve data.

Contribution

It presents a novel semi-analytical 1.5D model based on TauREx3 for simulating exoplanet phase curves efficiently, enabling comprehensive atmospheric analysis.

Findings

Model computes spectra at different phase angles efficiently.

Simulation speed is about 4 times slower than traditional models.

Framework is suitable for future phase curve atmospheric retrievals.

Abstract

In the recent years, retrieval analysis of exoplanet atmospheres have been very successful, providing deep insights on the composition and the temperature structure of these worlds via the transit and eclipse methods. Analysis of spectral phase curve observations, which in theory provides even more information, are still limited to a few planets. In the next decade, new facilities such as NASA-JWST and ESA-Ariel will revolutionise the field of exoplanet atmospheres and we expect that a significant time will be spent on spectral phase curve observations. Most current models are still limited in their analysis of phase curve data as they do not consider the planet atmosphere as a whole or they require large computational resources. In this paper we present a semi-analytical model that will allow to compute exoplanet emission spectra at different phase angles. Our model provides a way to simulate a large number of observations while being only about 4 times slower than the traditional forward model for plane parallel primary eclipse. This model, which is based on the newly developed TauREx3 framework (Al-Refaie 2020), will be further developed to allow for phase curve atmospheric retrievals.