Near-instantaneous atmospheric retrievals and model comparison with FASTER
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
In the era of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the dramatic improvement in the spectra of exoplanetary atmospheres demands a corresponding leap forward in our ability to analyze them: atmospheric retrievals need to be performed on thousands of spectra, applying to each large ensembles of models (that explore atmospheric chemistry, thermal profiles, and cloud models) to identify the best one(s). In this limit, traditional Bayesian inference methods such as nested sampling become prohibitively expensive. We introduce Fast Amortized Simulation-based Transiting Exoplanet Retrieval (FASTER), a neural-network-based method for performing atmospheric retrieval and Bayesian model comparison at a fraction of the computational cost of classical techniques. We demonstrate that the marginal posterior distributions of all parameters within a model and the posterior probabilities of the models we consider match those computed using nested sampling both on mock spectra and for the real NIRSpec PRISM spectrum of WASP-39b. The true power of the FASTER framework comes from its amortized nature, which allows the trained networks to perform practically instantaneous Bayesian inference and model comparison over ensembles of spectra—real or simulated—at minimal additional computational cost. This offers valuable insight into the expected results of model comparison (e.g., distinguishing cloudy from cloud-free and isothermal from nonisothermal models), as well as their dependence on the underlying parameters, which is computationally unfeasible with nested sampling. This approach will constitute as large a leap in spectral analysis as the original retrieval methods based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo have proven to be.
Date Issued
2025-05-01
Date Acceptance
2025-03-31
Citation
Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2025, 984 (1)
ISSN
2041-8205
Publisher
IOP Publishing
Journal / Book Title
Astrophysical Journal Letters
Volume
984
Issue
1
Copyright Statement
© 2025. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
License URL
Subjects
Astronomy & Astrophysics
BAYESIAN-INFERENCE
HELIOS-K
I.
LINE LISTS
OPACITY CALCULATOR
Physical Sciences
Science & Technology
SPECTRA
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
L32
Date Publish Online
2025-04-28