Toward a multidimensional analysis of transmission spectroscopy. Part III: Modelling 2D effects in retrievals with TauREx

TL;DR

This paper introduces TauREx 2D, a two-dimensional atmospheric retrieval model for exoplanets that balances computational efficiency with the need to capture complex atmospheric features, especially for hot Jupiters.

Contribution

The paper presents TauREx 2D, a novel 2D retrieval code that improves atmospheric parameter inference by accounting for limb variations and thermal dissociation effects.

Findings

TauREx 2D reduces biases in atmospheric parameter retrievals.

Prior knowledge of temperature-composition links enhances inference accuracy.

Application to synthetic spectra demonstrates improved bias mitigation.

Abstract

New-generation spectrographs dedicated to the study of exoplanetary atmospheres require a high accuracy in the atmospheric models to better interpret the input spectra. Thanks to space missions, the observed spectra will cover a large wavelength range from visible to mid-infrared with an higher precision compared to the old-generation instrumentation, revealing complex features coming from different regions of the atmosphere. For hot and ultra hot Jupiters (HJs and UHJs), the main source of complexity in the spectra comes from thermal and chemical differences between the day and the night sides. In this context, one-dimensional plane parallel retrieval models of atmospheres may not be suitable to extract the complexity of such spectra. In addition, Bayesian frameworks are computationally intensive and prevent us from using complete three-dimensional self-consistent models to retrieve exoplanetary atmospheres. We propose the TauREx 2D retrieval code, which uses two-dimensional atmospheric models as a good compromise between computational cost and model accuracy to better infer exoplanetary atmospheric characteristics for the hottest planets. TauREx 2D uses a 2D parametrization across the limb which computes the transmission spectrum from an exoplanetary atmosphere assuming azimuthal symmetry. It also includes a thermal dissociation model of various species. We demonstrate that, given an input observation, TauREx 2D mitigates the biases between the retrieved atmospheric parameters and the real atmospheric parameters. We also show that having a prior knowledge on the link between local temperature and composition is instrumental in inferring the temperature structure of the atmosphere. Finally, we apply such a model on a synthetic spectrum computed from a GCM simulation of WASP-121b and show how parameter biases can be removed when using two-dimensional forward models across the limb.