Speaker
Description
High-resolution transmission spectroscopy is one of the most fruitful techniques to infer the main opacity sources, thermospheric temperature and evaporation processes in the atmosphere of transiting exoplanets. Before retrieving the planetary features, however, observed spectra must be corrected for sky emission, residual atmospheric dispersion, presence of telluric features and interstellar lines, center to limb variation, and Rossiter-McLaughlin effect, with each of these steps possibly introducing systematic errors and altering the final transmission spectrum. The current lack of a public tool able to automatically extract a high-resolution transmission spectrum creates a problem of reproducibility of scientific results. As a consequence, it is very difficult to compare the results obtained by different research groups and to do a homogeneous characterization of the properties of exoplanetary atmospheres. In this talk I will present a standard, publicly available, user-friendly tool, named SLOPpy (Spectral Lines Of Planets with python, Sicilia et al. submitted), that automatically extracts the optical transmission spectrum of exoplanets and allows the perfect reproducibility of results. To validate the code and assess its performance, we performed a comparison with literature results of ideal targets for atmospheric characterization observed with HARPS and HARPS-N, finding a good agreement with published results. I will conclude the talk by highlighting a series of best practices that can greatly improve the reproducibility of results even when the analysis tools are not publicly released.
