Exoplanet Reflected Light Spectroscopy with PICASO

Understand

Here we present the first open-source radiative transfer model for computing the reflected light of exoplanets at any phase geometry, called PICASO: Planetary Intensity Code for Atmospheric Scattering Observations.

• This code, written in Python, has heritage from a decades old, well-known Fortran model used for several studies of planetary objects within the Solar System and beyond.
• We have adopted it to include several methodologies for computing both direct and diffuse scattering phase functions, and have added several updates including the ability to compute Raman scattering spectral features.
• Here we benchmark PICASO against two independent codes and discuss the degree to which the model is sensitive to a user's specification for various phase functions.