Planets and planetary systems change in brightness as a function of time. These "light curves" can have several features, including transits where a planet blocks some starlight, eclipses where a star obscures a planet's flux, and rotational variations where a planet reflects light differently as it spins. One can measure these brightness changes—which encode radii, temperatures, and more of planets—using current and planned telescopes. But interpreting light curves is an inverse problem: one has to extract astrophysical signals from the effects of imperfect instruments. In this thesis, I first present a meta study of planetary eclipses taken with the Spitzer Space Telescope. We find that eclipse depth uncertainties may be overly precise, especially those in early \emph{Spitzer} papers. I then offer the first rigorous test of BiLinearly-Interpolated Subpixel Sensitivity (BLISS) mapping, which is widely used to model detector systematics of \emph{Spitzer}. We show that this ad hoc method is not statistically sound, but it performs adequately in many real-life scenarios. Next, I present the most comprehensive empirical analysis to date on the energy budgets and bulk atmospherics of hot Jupiters. We find that dayside and nightside measurements suggest many hot Jupiters have reflective clouds in the infrared, and that day-night heat transport decreases as these planets are irradiated more. I lastly describe a semi-analytical model for how a planet's surfaces, clouds, and orbital geometry imprint on a light curve. We show that one can strongly constrain a planet's spin axis—and even spin direction—from modest high-precision data. Importantly, these methods will be useful for temperate, terrestrial planets with the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope and beyond

Last modified

• 02/19/2018

Creator

• Joel Colin Schwartz

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2Z67X

Subject

• Physics and Astronomy

Keyword

• Astrophysics

Date created

• 2016-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright