Professor Jonathan Tennyson, FRS will deliver a lecture titled 'What are exoplanets made of? Molecular line lists to aid the characterisaton of exoplanets.'

An abstract can be found below.

Abstract:

The desire to characterize and model the atmospheres of the many extrasolar planets that have been discovered over the last three decades is a major driver of current astronomy. This goal is impacted by the lack of spectroscopic data for the molecules that are thought to exist in observable planetary atmospheres. Since most of these atmospheres are hot, their modelling requires large quantities of spectroscopic data, in many cases billions of lines, to accurately reproduce their spectroscopic features. The ExoMol project was created to address this issue by providing extensive (computed) spectroscopic line lists. More recently we have been using laboratory high resolution spectroscopic data to provide highly accurate line positions. At the same time we have been addressing the issue of line profiles using a combination of machine learning and more traditional methods. We have extended our spectroscopic work to ultraviolet wavelengths where continuum absorption, predissociation and photodissociation all become important.

The lecture will present these various activities and summarise progress on them.