Transmission spectroscopy of TRAPPIST-1d with the new Palomar/WIRC+Spec instrument : a Karhunen-Loève transform based approach to extracting spectrophotometry
The TRAPPIST-1 system provides an unprecedented opportunity to characterize the first potentially habitable planets outside our solar system. In this work we describe the development of a custom data reduction pipeline for the WIRC+Spec mode of the recently upgraded Wide Field Infrared Camera instrument on Palomar Observatory. We introduce a novel, Karhunen-Loève transform based approach to extract photometric and spectroscopic light curves from irregularly shaped sources, which we apply to observations of the TRAPPIST-1d exoplanet to measure the J band (1.1 to 1.4 µm) and Ks band (1.95 to 2.35 µm) transmission spectra. We also present a detailed guide into the implementation of a self-consistent, radiative-convective temperature structure calculation for efficient and accurate atmospheric modelling. Comparing a host of atmospheric scenarios to the observations of TRAPPIST-1d to date, we constrain its atmosphere, ruling out cloud-free atmospheres with metallicities lower than 300 times the solar value at 3σ confidence.
Planets and satellites: individual (TRAPPIST-1d) Planets and satellites: atmospheres Transit spectroscopy Numerical methods