ABSTRACT

With the first report of a transiting planet in 1999, few predicted that within ten years we would be probing their atmospheres for organic molecules. For this talk I will briefly review the state of the art science being done with transiting planets including transit timing, phase curves and molecular spectroscopy of their atmospheres. These observations are revealing clues about the physical processes occurring in the atmospheres of these, very hot, dynamic planets. With periods as short as a day and eccentricities as high as 0.93, many of these planets are subject to immense temperature variations with sometimes surprising results. Now with Spitzer's IRS and MIPS instruments going into retirement and JWST on the horizon, efforts are shifting to what we can accomplish from the ground and whether we can, in the near future, clearly detect the atmosphere of a terrestrial, maybe even habitable, planet.