An attempt to detect water in the atmosphere of the extrasolar planet HD 209458b using transit spectroscopy is presented. A radiative transfer model, designed and built specifically for this project, predicts the dependence in wavelength of the stellar spectrum modulation due to a transiting planet, given a planetary temperature/pressure/composition profile. A total of 352 spectra around 1.8 microns were obtained during three transit events using ISAAC at the Very Large Telescope.Correlating the modeled modulation with the infrared spectra yields a non-detection of water in the atmosphere of HD 209458b due to overwhelming con-tamination from telluric water lines.Original data-reduction techniques that were developed during this work are also presented.
展开▼
