A Principal Component Analysis-based Method to Analyze High-resolution Spectroscopic Data on Exoplanets

Abstract

High-resolution spectroscopy has been used to study the composition and dynamics of exoplanetary atmospheres. In particular, the spectrometer CRIRES installed on the ESO-VLT has been used to record high-resolution spectra in the near-IR of gaseous exoplanets. Here we present a new automatic pipeline to analyze CRIRES data sets. Said pipeline is based on a novel use of the principal component analysis and the cross-correlation function. The exoplanetary atmosphere is modeled with the { \mathcal T }-REx code using opacities at high temperatures from the ExoMol project. In this work we tested our analysis tools on the detection of CO and H<SUB>2</SUB>O in the atmospheres of the hot Jupiters HD209458b and HD189733b. The results of our pipeline are in agreement with previous results in the literature and other techniques.