Abstract
The fields of astronomy and astrophysics are currently engaged in an unprecedented era of discovery as recent missions have revealed thousands of exoplanets orbiting other stars. While the Kepler Space Telescope mission has enabled most of these exoplanets to be detected by identifying transiting events, exoplanets often exhibit additional photometric effects that can be used to improve the characterization of exoplanets. The EXONEST Exoplanetary Explorer is a Bayesian exoplanet inference engine based on nested sampling and originally designed to analyze archived Kepler Space Telescope and CoRoT (Convection Rotation et Transits planétaires) exoplanet mission data. We discuss the EXONEST software package and describe how it accommodates plug-and-play models of exoplanet-associated photometric effects for the purpose of exoplanet detection, characterization and scientific hypothesis testing. The current suite of models allows for both circular and eccentric orbits in conjunction with photometric effects, such as the primary transit and secondary eclipse, reflected light, thermal emissions, ellipsoidal variations, Doppler beaming and superrotation. We discuss our new efforts to expand the capabilities of the software to include more subtle photometric effects involving reflected and refracted light. We discuss the EXONEST inference engine design and introduce our plans to port the current MATLAB-based EXONEST software package over to the next generation Exoplanetary Explorer, which will be a Python-based open source project with the capability to employ third-party plug-and-play models of exoplanet-related photometric effects.
Highlights
We are currently enjoying an unprecedented era of exploration and discovery
We summarize the EXONEST software package for detecting and characterizing exoplanets [15,16], as well as introduce our new efforts toward more careful modeling of reflected light, refracted light and atmospheric effects and their incorporation into the generation of the Exoplanetary Explorer software package
A study of KOI-2133b (Kepler-91b) by Esteves et al [43] found that the nightside temperature was 3100 ± 200 K, which was greater than the expected equilibrium temperature of 1570 K, leading them to hypothesize that Kepler-91b, which was later re-confirmed as a planet [44], was self-luminous
Summary
We are currently enjoying an unprecedented era of exploration and discovery. July of 2015 saw the New Horizons probe’s fly-by of Pluto and Charon, which marked the end of mankind’s initial exploration of the solar system. We are beginning to explore the neighboring star systems by discovering and characterizing their planets (exoplanets). One of the most successful missions to date is the Kepler Space Telescope (Kepler), which was designed to monitor the light intensity (photometry) from approximately 150,000 stars in the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra [3]. We summarize the EXONEST software package for detecting and characterizing exoplanets [15,16], as well as introduce our new efforts toward more careful modeling of reflected light, refracted light and atmospheric effects and their incorporation into the generation of the Exoplanetary Explorer software package. We are currently focused on porting and expanding the MATLAB-based EXONEST software package into the generation Exoplanetary Explorer software package, which will accommodate multiple planet systems, three-body and multi-body orbital mechanics, as well as more subtle photometric effects. The Exoplanetary Explorer will be a Python-based open source project with the capability to employ third-party plug-and-play models of exoplanet-related photometric effects
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