Spectral retrievals

Retrievals are a “fancy” (Bayesian!) way of fitting atmospheric model spectra to observations. For this methods such as MCMC and Nested Sampling are used. These constrain the probability distribution of model parameters, given the observations. Employing our spectral synthesis code petitRADTRANS, we run retrievals on all exoplanets types. A special interest of ours is constraining the properties of giant directly imaged planets, which still glow hot from formation. This includes constraining their cloud composition and structure. For our work we make use of data from instruments such as JWST, GRAVITY, HST, and SPHERE.