High-Resolution Spectroscopy for Exoplanet Atmospheres Workshop

Motivation 

Over the next few decades, the exoplanet community is poised to advance closer to answering a fundamental question about the universe and humanity’s place in it: Are we alone? High-resolution spectroscopy of exoplanets with the Extremely Large Telescopes (> 25 m) offers a unique opportunity to answer this question.  The high spectral resolutions and large apertures enable high signal-to-noise measurements of spectrally resolved lines of key atmospheric gases.  Current observational programs with 3 – 10 m class telescopes (e.g., TNG,  ESO 3.6 m, LDT, CFHT, Gemini N/S, VLT, Keck) and high resolution spectrographs (R>~15,000, e.g.,  HARPS, GIANO, SPIRou, ESPRESSO, MAROON-X, GHOST, IGRINS, CRIRES+) have and are continuing to reveal unique insights into the composition, chemistry, and climates of large gas giant planets.   

However, in order to maximize the science return from current instrumentation and the upcoming ELT’s, there is a pressing need to train the next generation of scientists in this challenging but powerful observational method.  In particular,  the pool of experts in this area within the US exoplanet community is rather small. Hence, there is a pressing need to train US-based junior scientists in ground-based high spectral resolution observational and analysis techniques so that we maximize the science return from current and upcoming platforms. 

The goal of this week-long workshop is to provide sufficient background via lectures and hands-on activities such that attendees will be able to:

• Open and read in pipeline processed data from a variety of US (e.g., IGRINS, MAROON-X, GHOST) and European-led (e.g, ESPRESSO, CRIRES+) instruments.

• Apply common telluric removal methods like PCA, SYSREM, and forward modeling.

• Perform model template-data cross-correlation analyses to detect atmospheric gases in both the transmission and emission geometries.

• Apply publicly available atmospheric retrieval tools combined with various CCF-to-log-likelihood mappings to obtain atmospheric parameter constraints.

• Plan and execute observations with a variety of instruments.

The workshop will be structured like the Sagan Summer Workshops, with a mix of pedagogical lectures and hands-on activities, as well as an opportunity for attendees to present their own work via daily poster sessions.