Abstract

The last decade of investigation into exoplanet atmospheres has revealed incredible detail about the physics and chemistry governing their behaviour throughout their evolution. This includes dynamics and global wind patterns, their clouds and optical colours, as well as new fundamental observables such as their spin. Despite all this, we have still barely scratched the surface, and we are about to rapidly move into the era of robust characterization of smaller icy and rocky worlds. In this talk, I will present my group’s work from Oxford and Amsterdam, that using high resolution spectroscopy and high contrast imaging to push the boundaries of observational technologies to access new information on exoplanet atmospheres. I will demonstrate how we are adapting high resolution spectroscopy to study the reflected light from exoplanets with the ELTs, which may be our only avenue this decade for detecting O2 biosignatures. This will include showing our simulations for HARMONI /ELT. I will also show how we are using novel apodizers to study high cadence time variability in directly imaged exoplanets. With this, we ultimately aim to enable mapping of storms and features of giant exoplanets with the ELTs.