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We report transmission spectroscopy of the bloated hot Jupiter WASP-74b in the wavelength range from 4000 to 6200 \r{A}. We observe two transit events with the Very Large Telescope FOcal Reducer and Spectrograph (VLT FORS2) and present a new method to measure the exoplanet transit depth as a function of wavelength. The new method removes the need for a reference star in correcting the spectroscopic light curves for the impact of atmospheric extinction. It also provides improved precision, compared to other techniques, reaching an average transit depth uncertainty of 211 ppm for a solar-type star of V=9.8 mag and over wavelength bins of 80 \r{A}. The VLT transmission spectrum is analysed both individually and in combination with published data from Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and Spitzer. The spectrum is found to exhibit a mostly featureless slope and equilibrium chemistry retrievals with PLATON favour hazes in the upper atmosphere of the exoplanet. Free chemistry retrievals with AURA further support the presence of hazes. While additional constraints are possible depending on the choice of atmospheric model, they are not robust and may be influenced by residual systematics in the data sets. Our results demonstrate the utility of new techniques in the analysis of optical, ground-based spectroscopic data and can be highly complementary to follow-up observations in the infrared with JWST., Comment: 18 pages, 12 figures, 4 tables, Accepted for publication in MNRAS

The formation of hazes at microbar pressures has been explored by theoretical models of exoplanet atmospheres to explain Rayleigh scattering and/or featureless transmission spectra; however observational evidence of aerosols in the low-pressure formation environments has proved elusive. Here, we show direct evidence of aerosols existing at ∼1 microbar pressures in the atmosphere of the warm sub-Saturn WASP-69b using observations taken with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph and Wide Field Camera 3 instruments on the Hubble Space Telescope. The transmission spectrum shows a wavelength-dependent slope induced by aerosol scattering that covers 11 scale heights of spectral modulation. Drawing on the extensive studies of haze in our solar system, we model the transmission spectrum based on a scaled version of Jupiter's haze-density profile to show that the WASP-69b transmission spectrum can be produced by scattering from an approximately constant density of particles extending throughout the atmospheric column from 40 millibar to microbar pressures. These results are consistent with theoretical expectations based on microphysics of the aerosol particles that have suggested haze can exist at microbar pressures in exoplanet atmospheres. © 2021. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved., This research has made use of the NASA Exoplanet Archive, which is operated by the California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under the Exoplanet Exploration Program. R.E. and M.S. acknowledge support for a portion of this effort from NASA ADAP award 907524. R.E. acknowledges the Sao Paulo Research Foundation for the fellowship #2018/09984-7. This work has been supported in part by the California Institute of Technology Jet Propulsion Laboratory Exoplanet Science Initiative. This research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004; 2021). All rights reserved., With funding from the Spanish government through the Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence accreditation SEV-2017-0709.

In the current theories of planet formation, the amount of energy that a forming gas giant retains from its accretion flow is still unknown. This unconstrained parameter has a large impact on the post-formation evolution of the new planet, as it defines its initial temperature and luminosity. Models have been developed, ranging from “hot-start” models assuming that all the energy is retained internally, to “cold-start” ones assuming that everything is radiated away, and "warm-start" ones in between. Their coexistence introduces large degeneracies on the determination of age and mass in direct imaging observations, as these studies use the cold or hot-start models to infer these parameters from the observed luminosity of a planet. A promising way of solving this problem is the study of atomic emission lines originating from the hot gas shocked by the accretion flow. Recently, Aoyama et al. (2018, 2020) presented simulations of hydrogen lines emitted by the accretion shock onto the circumplanetary disk and the planetary surface. They showed that the line luminosity and width can be used to infer the protoplanet mass, thus giving an estimation that is independent from the evolution models. They applied it to the case of PDS70 b and c (Aoyama & Ikoma 2019, Hashimoto et al. 2020), but were ultimately limited by the spectral resolution of the MUSE observations they used (R ~ 2500). In this context, our team recently proposed and carried out a pilot program using the VLT/ESPRESSO fiber-fed spectrograph, equipped with very high resolution (R = 190 000), to characterize the Hα line of the young substellar companion GQ Lup b. We will present in this poster how these observations were conducted, the methods used to remove the contamination from the host star, and the results we obtained.

Measurements of exoplanetary orbital obliquity angles for different classes of planets are an essential tool in testing various planet formation theories. Measurements for those transiting planets on relatively large orbital periods (P > 10 d) present a rather difficult observational challenge. Here we present the obliquity measurement for the warm sub-Saturn planet HD 332231 b, which was discovered through Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite photometry of sectors 14 and 15, on a relatively large orbital period (18.7 d). Through a joint analysis of previously obtained spectroscopic data and our newly obtained CARMENES transit observations, we estimated the spin-orbit misalignment angle, λ, to be −42.0−10.6+11.3 deg, which challenges Laplacian ideals of planet formation. Through the addition of these new radial velocity data points obtained with CARMENES, we also derived marginal improvements on other orbital and bulk parameters for the planet, as compared to previously published values. We showed the robustness of the obliquity measurement through model comparison with an aligned orbit. Finally, we demonstrated the inability of the obtained data to probe any possible extended atmosphere of the planet, due to a lack of precision, and place the atmosphere in the context of a parameter detection space. © ESO 2022., CARMENES is an instrument at the Centro Astronómico Hispano-Alemán (CAHA) at Calar Alto (Almería, Spain), operated jointly by the Junta de Andalucía and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (CSIC). The authors wish to express their sincere thanks to all members of the Calar Alto staff for their expert support of the instrument and telescope operation. We acknowledge financial support from the Agencia Estatal de Investigación of the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades through projects Ref. PID2019-110689RB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and the Centre of Excellence “Severo Ochoa” award to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (SEV-2017-0709). We also acknowledge the use of the ExoAtmospheres database during the preparation of this work and thank the team at the IAC for their excellent work preparing such a useful database. E.S. acknowledges support from ANID - Millennium Science Initiative - ICN12_009. K.M. acknowledges support from the Excellence Cluster ORIGINS, which is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy - EXC-2094 - 390783311. A.S.L. acknowledges funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 694513. Beside those explicitly mentioned in the manuscript, throughout this work the following python packages have been used: astropy (Astropy Collaboration 2018), corner (Foreman-Mackey 2016), matplotlib (Hunter 2007), NumPy (Harris et al. 2020), pandas (Pandas development team 2020), PyMC (Salvatier et al. 2016) and SciPy (Virtanen et al. 2020).

High-resolution precision spectroscopy provides a multitude of robust techniques for probing exoplanetary atmospheres. We present multiple VLT/ESPRESSO transit observations of the hot-Jupiter exoplanet WASP-19b with previously published but disputed atmospheric features from lowresolution studies. Through spectral synthesis and modelling of the Rossiter-McLaughlin (RM) effect we calculate stellar, orbital and physical parameters for the system. From narrow-band spectroscopy we do not detect any of HI, FeI, MgI, CaI, NaI, and KI neutral species, placing upper limits on their line contrasts. Through cross-correlation analyses with atmospheric models, we do not detect Fe I and place a 3σ upper limit of log (XFe/X⊙) ≈ -1.83 ± 0.11 on its mass fraction, from injection and retrieval. We show the inability to detect the presence of H2O for known abundances, owing to lack of strong absorption bands, as well as relatively low S/N ratio. We detect a barely significant peak (3.02±0.15 σ) in the cross-correlation map for TiO, consistent with the sub-solar abundance previously reported. This is merely a hint for the presence of TiO and does not constitute a confirmation. However, we do confirm the presence of previously observed enhanced scattering towards blue wavelengths, through chromatic RM measurements, pointing to a hazy atmosphere. We finally present a reanalysis of low-resolution transmission spectra of this exoplanet, concluding that unocculted starspots alone cannot explain previously detected features. Our reanalysis of the FORS2 spectra of WASP-19b finds a ~100× sub-solar TiO abundance, precisely constrained to log XTiO ≈ -7.52 ± 0.38, consistent with the TiO hint from ESPRESSO. We present plausible paths to reconciliation with other seemingly contradicting results. © 2021 The Author(s)., We acknowledge the use of the following PYTHON packages in addition to those explicitly mentioned in the text: NUMPY (Harris et al. 2020), MATPLOTLIB (Hunter 2007), SCIPY (Virtanen et al. 2020), PANDAS (McKinney et al. 2010), EMCEE (Foreman-Mackey et al. 2013), SCIKIT-LEARN (Pedregosa et al. 2011), NUMBA (Lam, Pitrou & Seibert 2015), CORNER (Foreman-Mackey 2016), and ASTROPY (Price-Whelan et al. 2018). This work has made use of the VALD database, operated at Uppsala University, the Institute of Astronomy RAS in Moscow, and the University of Vienna. ES acknowledges support from ESO through its fellowship program. RB acknowledges support from FONDECYT Project 11200751, and CORFO project No. 14ENI2-26865. RB acknowledges support from ANID – Millennium Science Initiative – ICN12_009., With funding from the Spanish government through the Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence accreditation SEV-2017-0709.

Casasayas-Barris, N., et al., Ultra-hot Jupiters are highly irradiated gas giants with equilibrium temperatures typically higher than 2000 K. Atmospheric studies of these planets have shown that their transmission spectra are rich in metal lines, with some of these metals being ionised due to the extreme temperatures. Here, we use two transit observations of WASP-76b obtained with the CARMENES spectrograph to study the atmosphere of this planet using high-resolution transmission spectroscopy. Taking advantage of the two channels and the coverage of the red and near-infrared wavelength ranges by CARMENES, we focus our analysis on the study of the Ca II infrared triplet (IRT) at 8500 Å and the He I triplet at 10 830 Å. We present the discovery of the Ca II IRT at 7¿ in the atmosphere of WASP-76b using the cross-correlation technique, which is consistent with previous detections of the Ca II H&K lines in the same planet, and with the atmospheric studies of other ultra-hot Jupiters reported to date. The low mass density of the planet, and our calculations of the XUV (X-ray and EUV) irradiation received by the exoplanet, show that this planet is a potential candidate to have a He I evaporating envelope and, therefore, we performed further investigations focussed on this aspect. The transmission spectrum around the He I triplet shows a broad and red-shifted absorption signal in both transit observations. However, due to the strong telluric contamination around the He I lines and the relatively low signal-to-noise ratio of the observations, we are not able to unambiguously conclude if the absorption is due to the presence of helium in the atmosphere of WASP-76b, and we consider the result to be only an upper limit. Finally, we revisit the transmission spectrum around other lines such as Na I, Li I, H¿, and K I. The upper limits reported here for these lines are consistent with previous studies., We acknowledge funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement no. 694513, the Agencia Estatal de Investigación of the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades and the ERDF through projects PID2019-109522GB-C5[1:4]/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, PID2019- 110689RB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, ESP2017-87143-R, and ESP2016- 80435-C2-2-R, and the Centre of Excellence “Severo Ochoa” and “María de Maeztu” awards to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (CEX2019-000920- S), Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (SEV-2017-0709), and Centro de Astrobiología (MDM-2017-0737), and the Generalitat de Catalunya/CERCA programme. T.H. acknowledges support by the European Research Council under the Horizon 2020 Framework Program via the ERC Advanced Grant Origins 83 24 28. G.M. has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 895525.

We report on the confirmation of a transiting giant planet around the relatively hot (Teff = 6801 $\pm$ 56 K) star HD2685, whose transit signal was detected in Sector 1 data of the TESS mission. We confirmed the planetary nature of the transit signal by using Doppler velocimetric measurements with CHIRON, CORALIE and FEROS, as well as photometric data with CHAT and LCOGT. From the photometry and radial velocities joint analysis, we derived the following parameters for HD2685 $b$: $P$=4.12692$\pm$0.00004 days, M$_P$=1.18 $\pm$ 0.09 $M_J$ and $R_P$=1.44 $\pm$ 0.01 $R_J$. This system is a typical example of an inflated transiting Hot-Jupiter in a circular orbit. Given the host star apparent visual magnitude ($V$ = 9.6 mag), this is one of the brightest known stars hosting a transiting Hot-Jupiter, and a good example of the upcoming systems that will be detected by TESS during the two-year primary mission. This is also an excellent target for future ground and space based atmospheric characterization as well as a good candidate for measuring the projected spin-orbit misalignment angle via the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect., Comment: Submitted for publication to A&A

Mostly multiband photometric transit observations have been used so far to retrieve broadband transmission spectra of transiting exoplanets in order to study their atmosphere. An alternative method has been proposed and has only been used once to recover transmission spectra using chromatic Rossiter-McLaughlin observations. Stellar activity has been shown to potentially imitate narrow and broadband features in the transmission spectra retrieved from multiband photometric observations; however, there has been no study regarding the influence of stellar activity on the retrieved transmission spectra through chromatic Rossiter-McLaughlin. In this study with the modified SOAP3.0 tool, we consider different types of stellar activity features (spots and plages), and we generated a large number of realistic chromatic Rossiter-McLaughlin curves for different types of planets and stars. We were then able to retrieve their transmission spectra to evaluate the impact of stellar activity on them. We find that chromatic Rossiter-McLaughlin observations are also not immune to stellar activity, which can mimic broadband features, such as Rayleigh scattering slope, in their retrieved transmission spectra. We also find that the influence is independent of the planet radius, orbital orientations, orbital period, and stellar rotation rate. However, more general simulations demonstrate that the probability of mimicking strong broadband features is lower than 25% and that can be mitigated by combining several Rossiter-McLaughlin observations obtained during several transits. © ESO 2020., M.O. acknowledges the support of the Deutsche Forschungs-gemeinschft (DFG) priority program SPP 1992 “Exploring the Diversity of Extrasolar Planets (RE 1664/17-1)”. S.B. and M.O. also acknowledge the support of the FCT/DAAD bilateral grant 2019 (DAAD ID: 57453096). M.O and N.S. were also supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT, Portugal) /MCTES through national funds by FEDER through COMPETE2020 by these grants: UID/FIS/04434/2019 & POCI-01-0145-FEDER-028953 and PTDC/FIS-AST/32113/2017 & PTDC/FIS-AST/28953/2017 & POCI-01-0145-FEDER-032113. We would like to thank the anonymous referee for insightful suggestions, which added significantly to the clarity of this paper.

In this paper a homomorphic filtering scheme is proposed to improve the estimation of the planet/star radius ratio in astronomical transit signals. The idea is to reduce the effect of the short-term earth atmosphere variations. A two-step method is presented to compute the parameters of the transit curve from both the unfiltered and filtered data. A Monte Carlo analysis is performed by using correlated and uncorrelated noise to determine the parameters of the proposed FFT filter. The method is tested with observations of WASP-19b and WASP-17bobtained with the FORS2 instrument at the Very Large Telescope (VLT). The multi parametric fitting and the associated errors are obtained with the JKTEBOP software. The results with the white light of the exo-planet data mentioned above suggest that the homomorphic filtering can lead to substantial relative reductions in the error bars as high as 45.5% and 76.9%, respectively. The achieved reductions in the averaged error bars per channel were 48.4% with WASP-19b and 63.6% with WASP-17b. Open source MATLAB code to run the method proposed here can be downloaded from http://www.cmrsp.cl . This code was used to obtain the results presented in this paper.

As an exoplanet transits its host star, some of the light from the star is absorbed by the atoms and molecules in the planet's atmosphere, causing the planet to seem bigger; plotting the planet's observed size as a function of the wavelength of the light produces a transmission spectrum. Measuring the tiny variations in the transmission spectrum, together with atmospheric modelling, then gives clues to the properties of the exoplanet's atmosphere. Chemical species composed of light elements$-$such as hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, sodium and potassium$-$have in this way been detected in the atmospheres of several hot giant exoplanets, but molecules composed of heavier elements have thus far proved elusive. Nonetheless, it has been predicted that metal oxides such as titanium oxide (TiO) and vanadium oxide occur in the observable regions of the very hottest exoplanetary atmospheres, causing thermal inversions on the dayside. Here we report the detection of TiO in the atmosphere of the hot-Jupiter planet WASP-19b. Our combined spectrum, with its wide spectral coverage, reveals the presence of TiO (to a confidence level of 7.7{\sigma}), a strongly scattering haze (7.4{\sigma}) and sodium (3.4{\sigma}), and confirms the presence of water (7.9{\sigma}) in the atmosphere., Comment: Main article: 9 pages, 3 figures. Methods: 21 pages, 7 extended data figures, 3 extended data tables. Published in Nature

Exoplanetary atmospheric observations require an exquisite precision in the measurement of the relative flux among wavelengths. In this paper, we aim to provide a new adaptive method to treat light curves before fitting transit parameters in order to minimize systematic effects that affect, for instance, ground-based observations of exo-atmospheres. We propose a neural-network-based method that uses a reference built from the data itself with parameters that are chosen in an unsupervised fashion. To improve the performance of proposed method, K-means clustering and Silhouette criteria are used for identifying similar wavelengths in each cluster. We also constrain under which circumstances our method improves the measurement of planetary-to-stellar radius ratio without producing significant systematic offset. We tested our method in high quality data from WASP-19b and low quality data from GJ-1214. We succeed in providing smaller error bars for the former when using JKTEBOP, but GJ-1214 light curve was beyond the capabilities of this method to improve as it was expected from our validation tests., Comment: 14 pages, 18 figures

We derive the 0.01 $\mu$m binned transmission spectrum, between 0.74 and 1.0 $\mu$m, of WASP-80b from low resolution spectra obtained with the FORS2 instrument attached to ESO's Very Large Telescope. The combination of the fact that WASP-80 is an active star, together with instrumental and telluric factors, introduces correlated noise in the observed transit light curves, which we treat quantitatively using Gaussian Processes. Comparison of our results together with those from previous studies, to theoretically calculated models reveals an equilibrium temperature in agreement with the previously measured value of 825K, and a sub-solar metallicity, as well as an atmosphere depleted of molecular species with absorption bands in the IR ($\gg 5\sigma$). Our transmission spectrum alone shows evidence for additional absorption from the potassium core and wing, whereby its presence is detected from analysis of narrow 0.003 $\mu$m bin light curves ($\gg 5\sigma$). Further observations with visible and near-UV filters will be required to expand this spectrum and provide more in-depth knowledge of the atmosphere. These detections are only made possible through an instrument-dependent baseline model and a careful analysis of systematics in the data., Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, 3 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRAS

Transmission spectroscopy facilitates the detection of molecules and/or clouds in the atmospheres of exoplanets. Such studies rely heavily on space-based or large ground-based observatories, as one needs to perform time- resolved, high signal-to-noise spectroscopy. The FORS2 instrument at ESO's Very Large Telescope is the obvious choice for performing such studies, and was indeed pioneering the field in 2010. After that, however, it was shown to suffer from systematic errors caused by the Longitudinal Atmospheric Dispersion Corrector (LADC). This was successfully addressed, leading to a renewed interest for this instrument as shown by the number of proposals submitted to perform transmission spectroscopy of exoplanets. We present here the context, the problem and how we solved it, as well as the recent results obtained. We finish by providing tips for an optimum strategy to do transmission spectroscopy with FORS2, in the hope that FORS2 may become the instrument of choice for ground-based transmission spectroscopy of exoplanets., Paper 9908-85 presented at SPIE 2016

In the past few years, the study of exoplanets has evolved from being pure discovery, then being more exploratory in nature and finally becoming very quantitative. In particular, transmission spectroscopy now allows the study of exoplanetary atmospheres. Such studies rely heavily on space-based or large ground-based facilities, because one needs to perform time-resolved, high signal-to-noise spectroscopy. The very recent exchange of the prisms of the FORS2 atmospheric diffraction corrector on ESO's Very Large Telescope should allow us to reach higher data quality than was ever possible before. With FORS2, we have obtained the first optical ground-based transmission spectrum of WASP-19b, with 20 nm resolution in the 550--830 nm range. For this planet, the data set represents the highest resolution transmission spectrum obtained to date. We detect large deviations from planetary atmospheric models in the transmission spectrum redwards of 790 nm, indicating either additional sources of opacity not included in the current atmospheric models for WASP-19b or additional, unexplored sources of systematics. Nonetheless, this work shows the new potential of FORS2 for studying the atmospheres of exoplanets in greater detail than has been possible so far., 7 pages, 9 figures, 3 tables. Accepted for publication in A&A

We present FORS2 (attached to ESO's Very Large Telescope) observations of the exoplanet WASP-17b during its primary transit, for the purpose of differential spectrophotometry analysis. We use the instrument in its Mask eXchange Unit (MXU) mode to simultaneously obtain low resolution spectra of the planet hosting star, as well as several reference stars in the field of view. The integration of these spectra within broadband and smaller 100$\AA$ bins provides us with 'white' and spectrophotometric light curves, from 5700 to 8000$\AA$. Through modelling the white light curve, we obtain refined bulk and transit parameters of the planet, as well as wavelength-dependent variations of the planetary radius from smaller spectral bins through which the transmission spectrum is obtained. The inference of transit parameters, as well as the noise statistics, is performed using a Gaussian Process model. We achieve a typical precision in the transit depth of a few hundred parts per million from various transit light curves. From the transmission spectra we rule out a flat spectrum at >3$\sigma$ and detect marginal presence of the pressure-broadened sodium wings. Furthermore, we detect the wing of the potassium absorption line in the upper atmosphere of the planet with 3$\sigma$ confidence, both facts pointing to a relatively shallow temperature gradient of the atmosphere. These conclusions are mostly consistent with previous studies of this exo-atmosphere, although previous potassium measurements have been inconclusive., Comment: 14 pages, 11 figures, 4 tables. Accepted for publication in A&A