Overview
Good people of Carnegie: this talk’s abstract may appear to be about planets, and perhaps it is, but you should come to the talk for the stats methods. It might be fun, and better yet, it might be useful. Optical phase curves of exoplanets constrain properties of planetary atmospheres, and their reflected light phase curves communicate fundamental properties of the photosphere or scattering surface. However, reflected light phase curves of hot exoplanet atmospheres are contaminated by thermal emission and stellar artifacts. We devise a Bayesian inference framework for optical phase curves which includes flux contributions from reflected light from a potentially inhomogeneous atmosphere, thermal emission, and stellar rotation. We apply this framework to the highly precise Kepler observations of five hot Jupiters to assess atmospheric homogeneity and time-variability. We also investigate the scattering properties which constrain the likely condensates in inhomogeneous atmospheres.