Reflected spectroscopy of small exoplanets I: determining the atmospheric composition of sub-Neptunes planets

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that reflected light spectroscopy combined with a Bayesian retrieval algorithm can effectively determine the atmospheric composition of small, temperate exoplanets, including non-H2 dominated atmospheres, without prior compositional knowledge.

Contribution

Introduces a novel compositional analysis technique and prior functions within a Bayesian framework for exoplanet atmospheric retrievals from reflected light spectra.

Findings

The retrieval algorithm can identify the dominant atmospheric gas.

It can constrain less abundant gases with high confidence.

The novel prior improves retrieval performance.

Abstract

Direct imaging of widely separated exoplanets from space will obtain their reflected light spectra and measure their atmospheric properties, and small and temperate planets will be the focus of the next generation telescopes. In this work, we used our Bayesian retrieval algorithm ExoReL$^{\Re}$ to determine the constraints on the atmospheric properties of sub-Neptune planets from observations taken with a HabEx-like telescope. Small and temperate planets may have a non-H$_2$-dominated atmosphere, and therefore, we introduced the compositional analysis technique in our framework to explore the bulk atmospheric chemistry composition without any prior knowledge about it. We have developed a novel set of prior functions for the compositional analysis free parameters. We compared the performances of the framework with the flat prior and the novel prior and we reported a better performance when using the novel priors set. We found that the retrieval algorithm can not only identify the dominant gas of the atmosphere but also to constraint other less abundant gases with high statistical confidence without any prior information on the composition. The results presented here demonstrates that reflected light spectroscopy can characterize small exoplanets with diverse atmospheric composition. The Bayesian framework should be applied to design the instrument and the observation plan of exoplanet direct imaging experiments in the future.