Towards a more complex description of chemical profiles in exoplanets retrievals: A 2-layer parameterisation

Understand

State of the art spectral retrieval models of exoplanet atmospheres assume constant chemical profiles with altitude.

• This assumption is justified by the information content of current datasets which do not allow, in most cases, for the molecular abundances as a function of pressure to be constrained.
• In the context of the next generation of telescopes, a more accurate description of chemical profiles may become crucial to interpret observations and gain new insights into atmospheric physics.
• We explore here the possibility of retrieving pressure-dependent chemical profiles from transit spectra, without injecting any priors from theoretical chemical models in our retrievals.