Forward modelling and retrievals with PLATON, a fast open source tool

Understand

We introduce PLanetary Atmospheric Transmission for Observer Noobs (PLATON), a Python package that calculates transmission spectra for exoplanets and retrieves atmospheric characteristics based on observed spectra.

• PLATON is easy to install and use, with common use cases taking no more than a few lines of code.
• It is also fast, with the forward model taking much less than one second and a typical retrieval finishing in minutes on an ordinary desktop.
• PLATON supports the most common atmospheric parameters, such as temperature, metallicity, C/O ratio, cloud-top pressure, and scattering slope.