Towards simulation of high temperature methane spectra

Methane plays a central role in gas layers of temperatures up to around 3000 K in a number of astrophysical objects ranging from giant planets to brown dwarfs, over proto-solar nebulae, to several classes of cool stars. In order to model and analyse these objects correctly, an accurate and complete list of spectral lines at high temperature is demanded. Predicting high temperature spectra implies, however, predicting hot bands and thus modelling highly excited vibrational states. This is a real challenge in the case of methane. We report the preliminary results of a theoretical study combining the global effective Hamiltonian approach and its computational implementation (STDS package: http://www.u-bourgogne.fr/LPUB/shTDS.html) with semi-quantitative statistical considerations.