EXOPATH 

Exoplanet research has found planetary system with strikingly different configurations and physical properties than the solar system. How do planets form? Can their present composition reveal their past formation and evolution? As of today several theories have been proposed to explain the origin of HGPs, none able to fully explain the observed properties. This project aims at achieving a deeper understanding in these topics, actively contributing to an extremely fast growing area of research about the estimation of chemical abundances in the exoplanetary atmospheres, which reflect the exoplanets formation and evolution history. This will be done through the use of a sophisticated and state-of-the-art bayesian framework developed at INAF-Astrophysical Observatory of Torino, which will allow me to fully exploit the high-resolution (HR) data for the first time and perform a joint retrieval of low- (LR) and HR data, exploring a wide parameter space and dealing with different data reduction techniques. This analysis will lead not only to the detection of several molecules in the atmosphere of hot giant exoplanets, but also to the retrieval of fundamental properties, such as the measurement of planetary atmospheric metallicity and chemical abundances, which in turn will be linked to the formation theories, adding fundamental information to this still far-to-be-fully- understood field. This project is expected to deliver novel methods for the detection of atomic and molecular species in the exoplanetary atmospheres, which will be applied in the future to giant and smaller (temperate) planets that will be observed at HR with very large telescopes (e.g.,ELT) and with JWST and Ariel at LR, with the ultimate goal to search for atmospheric biomarkers.