This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Dr. Lópes-Morales, along with her collaborators and students, will undertake a three-year project to measure thermal emission from over a dozen Hot Jupiter extrasolar planets at optical and near-infrared wavelengths. The main goal of the project is to characterize the atmospheric properties of these planets as individual objects. Measurements of over a dozen hot Jupiters will also enable comparative exoplanetology, where the atmospheric properties of different planets will be compared and contrasted. Hot Jupiters are giant planets orbiting extremely close to their host stars, typically with orbital periods of less than three days, and are heated by their parent stars. It has been recently realized that these planets can emit significant amounts of thermal radiation at optical and near-infrared wavelengths, and could therefore be detected using ground-based instruments. Thermal emission of exoplanets at mid-infrared wavelengths has already been successfully detected from space with the Spitzer Space Telescope. This project extends those detections to wavelengths between 0.9 and 2.2 microns, to more accessible ground-based facilities, and to a larger sample of planets. The project will also allow continuation of exoplanet atmosphere studies after Spitzer's cryogenic mission has ended. Thermal emission from the planets will be measured using transiting systems, where the planets cross the stellar disks, as seen from Earth, producing what is called a primary transit, where a small fraction of the stellar light gets temporarily blocked by the planet producing a small eclipse. These observations will yield the temperature of the planets, and other parameters such as their albedos (the fraction of stellar incident light that gets reflected back to space, which gives information about the presence of clouds), and information about energy circulation mechanisms in their atmospheres. By measuring the secondary eclipses of the planets in more than one wavelength, they will also be able to estimate the chemical composition of their atmospheres.
The study and characterization of exoplanet atmospheres is a novel and very active endeavor, which is driving large efforts among the scientific community in different fields, such as astronomy, physics, planetary science, atmospheric chemistry, biology and material science. The field also attracts wide attention from the public, a fact that facilitates broad dissemination of the new discoveries this project will produce. The results of this project will be promptly communicated to both to the scientific and the public community. To this last group results will be transmitted via public lectures and a review of the subject in large-circulation popular astronomy magazines. The results will be also used to promote the interest in science careers among minority groups, a task that the PI of this project has been promoting in recent years.
