Luas for Exoplanets

luas has been designed to be a general-purpose GP library which should be simple to apply to any 2D data set. However, exoplanet astronomy is a particular focus and luas has already been used with jaxoplanet for transmission spectroscopy in Fortune et al. (2024). This was for the analysis of ground-based data from VLT/FORS2 but an upcoming paper will be demonstrating how it can help analyse JWST data.

Currently luas only supports jax functions to be used as the deterministic mean function within the GP. However, this should not be a major issue as there are plenty of exoplanet packages with implementations in jax. In addition to jaxoplanet which can be used for efficient transit modelling, kelp can be used for computing exoplanet phase curves in both reflected and emitted light and harmonica can be used for mapping the shapes of exoplanets (e.g. identifying limb-asymmetries) using transmission spectroscopy. While functions to build light curves using jaxoplanet have been included in the luas.exoplanet submodule, make sure to separately cite this package as it is independent from luas.