Thousands of exoplanets have now been discovered with a huge range of masses, sizes and orbits: from rocky Earth-like planets to large gas giants grazing the surface of their host star. However, the essential nature of these exoplanets remains largely mysterious: there is no known, discernible pattern linking the presence, size, or orbital parameters of a planet to the nature of its parent star. We have little idea whether the chemistry of a planet is linked to its formation environment, or whether the type of host star drives the physics and chemistry of the planet's birth, and evolution. ARIEL was conceived to observe a large number (~1000) of transiting planets for statistical understanding, including gas giants, Neptunes, super-Earths and Earth-size planets around a range of host star types using transit spectroscopy in the 1.25-7.8 μm spectral range and multiple narrow-band photometry in the optical. ARIEL will focus on warm and hot planets to take advantage of their well-mixed atmospheres which should show minimal condensation and sequestration of high-Z materials compared to their colder Solar System siblings. Said warm and hot atmospheres are expected to be more representative of the planetary bulk composition. Observations of these warm/hot exoplanets, and in particular of their elemental composition (especially C, O, N, S, Si), will allow the understanding of the early stages of planetary and atmospheric formation during the nebular phase and the following few million years. ARIEL will thus provide a representative picture of the chemical nature of the exoplanets and relate this directly to the type and chemical environment of the host star. ARIEL is designed as a dedicated survey mission for combined-light spectroscopy, capable of observing a large and welldefined planet sample within its 4-year mission lifetime. Transit, eclipse and phasecurve spectroscopy methods, whereby the signal from the star and planet are differentiated using knowledge of the planetary ephemerides, allow us to measure atmospheric signals from the planet at levels of 10-100 part per million (ppm) relative to the star and, given the bright nature of targets, also allows more sophisticated techniques, such as eclipse mapping, to give a deeper insight into the nature of the atmosphere. These types of observations require a stable payload and satellite platform with broad, instantaneous wavelength coverage to detect many molecular species, probe the thermal structure, identify clouds and monitor the stellar activity. The wavelength range proposed covers all the expected major atmospheric gases from e.g. H 2 O, CO 2 , CH 4 NH 3 , HCN, H 2 S through to the more exotic metallic compounds, such as TiO, VO, and condensed species. Simulations of ARIEL performance in conducting exoplanet surveys have been performedusing conservative estimates of mission performance and a

We report near-infrared measurements of the terminator region transmission spectrum and dayside emission spectrum of the exoplanet WASP-12b obtained using the HST WFC3 instrument. The disk-average dayside brightness temperature averages about 2900 K, peaking to 3200 K around 1.46 microns. We modeled a range of atmospheric cases for both the emission and transmission spectrum and confirm the recent finding by Crossfield et al. (2012b) that there is no evidence for C/O >1 in the atmosphere of WASP-12b. Assuming a physically plausible atmosphere, we find evidence that the presence of a number of molecules is consistent with the data, but the justification for inclusion of these opacity sources based on the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) is marginal. We also find the near-infrared primary eclipse light curve is consistent with small amounts of prolate distortion. As part of the calibration effort for these data, we conducted a detailed study of instrument systematics using 65 orbits of WFC3-IR grims observations. The instrument systematics are dominated by detector-related affects, which vary significantly depending on the detector readout mode. The 256x256 subarray observations of WASP 12 produced spectral measurements within 15% of the photon-noise limit using a simple calibration approach. Residual systematics are estimated to be less than 70 parts per million.Comment: Accepted for publication in Icaru

Context. Current observation techniques are able to probe the atmosphere of some giant exoplanets and get some clues about their atmospheric composition. However, the chemical compositions derived from observations are not fully understood. For instance, the CH 4 /CO abundance ratio is often inferred to be different from the value that has been predicted by chemical models. Recently, the warm Neptune GJ 3470b has been discovered, and because of its close distance from us and high transit depth, it is a very promising candidate for follow-up characterisation of its atmosphere. Aims. We study the atmospheric composition of GJ 3470b to compare to the current observations of this planet and to prepare for future ones but also to understand the chemical composition of warm (sub-)Neptunes as a typical case study. The metallicity of such atmospheres is totally uncertain and are likely to vary to values up to 100× solar. We explore the space of unknown parameters to predict the range of possible atmospheric compositions. Methods. We use a one-dimensional chemical code to compute a grid of models with various thermal profiles, metallicities, eddy diffusion coefficient profiles, and stellar UV incident fluxes. Thanks to a radiative transfer code, we then compute the corresponding emission and transmission spectra of the planet and compare them with the observational data already published. Results. Within the parameter space explored we find that methane is the major carbon-bearing species in most cases. We, however, find that for high metallicities with a sufficiently high temperature, the CH 4 /CO abundance ratio can become lower than unity, as suggested by some multiwavelength photometric observations of other warm (sub-)Neptunes, such as GJ 1214b and GJ 436b. As for the emission spectrum of GJ 3470b, brightness temperatures at infrared wavelengths may vary between 400 and 800 K depending on the thermal profile and metallicity. Conclusions. Combined with a hot temperature profile, a substantial enrichment in heavy elements by a factor of ≥100 with respect to the solar composition can shift the carbon balance in favour of carbon monoxide at the expense of methane. Nevertheless, current observations of this planet do not allow us yet to determine which model is more accurate.

The Twinkle space telescope has been designed for the characterisation of exoplanets and Solar System objects. Operating in a low Earth, Sunsynchronous orbit, Twinkle is equipped with a 45 cm telescope and visible (0.4 -1µm) and infrared (1.3 -4.5µm) spectrometers which can be operated simultaneously. Twinkle is a general observatory which will provide on-demand observations of a wide variety of targets within wavelength ranges that are currently not accessible using other space telescopes or accessible only to oversubscribed observatories in the short-term future.Here we explore the ability of Twinkle's spectrometers to characterise the currently-known exoplanets. We study the spectral resolution achievable by combining multiple observations for various planetary and stellar types. We also simulate spectral retrievals for some well-known planets (HD 209458 b, GJ 3470 b and 55 Cnc e).From the exoplanets known today, we find that with a single transit or eclipse, Twinkle could probe 89 planets at low spectral resolution (R <20) as well as 12 planets at higher resolution (R >20) in channel 1 (1.3 -4.5µm). With 10 observations, the atmospheres of 144 planets could be characterised with R <20 and 81 at higher resolutions.Upcoming surveys will reveal thousands of new exoplanets, many of which will be located within Twinkle's field of regard. TESS in particular 1 arXiv:1811.08348v2 [astro-ph.EP]

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