A Detection of Water in the Transmission Spectrum of the Hot Jupiter WASP-12b and Implications for its Atmospheric Composition
Laura Kreidberg,Michael R. Line,Jacob L. Bean,Kevin B. Stevenson,Jean-Michel Desert,Nikku Madhusudhan,Jonathan J. Fortney,Joanna K. Barstow,Gregory W. Henry,Michael H. Williamson,Adam P. Showman +10 more
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In this article, a near-infrared transmission spectrum for WASP-12b based on six transit observations with the Hubble Space Telescope/Wide Field Camera 3 (HST-WFC) was reported.Abstract:
Detailed characterization of exoplanets has begun to yield measurements of their atmospheric properties that constrain the planets’ origins and evolution. For example, past observations of the dayside emission spectrum of the hot Jupiter WASP-12b indicated that its atmosphere has a high carbon-tooxygen ratio (C/O > 1), suggesting it had a dierent formation pathway than is commonly assumed for giant planets. Here we report a precise near-infrared transmission spectrum for WASP-12b based on six transit observations with the Hubble Space Telescope/Wide Field Camera 3. We bin the data in 13 spectrophotometric light curves from 0.84 - 1.67 m and measure the transit depths to a median precision of 51 ppm. We retrieve the atmospheric properties using the transmission spectrum and nd strong evidence for water absorption (7 condence). This detection marks the rst high-condence, spectroscopic identication of a molecule in the atmosphere of WASP-12b. The retrieved 1 water volume mixing ratio is between 10 5 10 2 , which is consistent with C/O > 1 to within 2 . However, we also introduce a new retrieval parameterization that ts for C/O and metallicity under the assumption of chemical equilibrium. With this approach, we constrain C/O to 0:5 +0:2 0:3 at 1 and rule out a carbon-rich atmosphere composition (C/O> 1) at > 3 condence. Further observations and modeling of the planet’s global thermal structure and dynamics would aid in resolving the tension between our inferred C/O and previous constraints. Our ndings highlight the importance of obtaining high-precision data with multiple observing techniques in order to obtain robust constraints on the chemistry and physics of exoplanet atmospheres. Subject headings: planets and satellites: atmospheres | planets and satellites: composition | planets and satellites: individual: WASP-12bread more
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore how well spectra from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will likely constrain bulk atmospheric properties of transiting exoplanets.
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Characterizing transiting exoplanet atmospheres with JWST
Thomas P. Greene,Michael R. Line,Cezar Montero,Jonathan J. Fortney,Jacob Lustig-Yeager,Kyle Luther +5 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore how well James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) spectra will likely constrain bulk atmospheric properties of transiting exoplanets, and they find that the JWST spectra can often constrain the major molecular constituents of clear solar composition atmospheres well.
batman: BAsic Transit Model cAlculatioN in Python
TL;DR: Batman as discussed by the authors is a Python package for modeling exoplanet transit light curves that uses C extension modules to speed up model calculation and is parallelized with OpenMP, which can calculate one million quadratic limb-darkened models in 30 seconds with a single 1.7 GHz Intel Core i5 processor.
Journal ArticleDOI
From thermal dissociation to condensation in the atmospheres of ultra hot Jupiters: WASP-121b in context
Vivien Parmentier,Vivien Parmentier,Michael R. Line,Jacob L. Bean,Megan Mansfield,Laura Kreidberg,Roxana Lupu,Channon Visscher,Channon Visscher,Jean-Michel Desert,Jonathan J. Fortney,M. Deleuil,Jacob Arcangeli,Adam P. Showman,Mark S. Marley +14 more
TL;DR: The spectral properties of ultra hot Jupiters were investigated in this article, where the authors used the SPARC/MITgcm spectral model to model the atmospheres of the four ultra hot supergiants and discussed more thoroughly the case of WASP-121b.
Journal ArticleDOI
The imprint of exoplanet formation history on observable present-day spectra of hot Jupiters
Christoph Mordasini,Christoph Mordasini,R. van Boekel,Paul Mollière,Th. Henning,Björn Benneke +5 more
TL;DR: In this article, a chain of models, linking the formation of a planet to its observable present-day spectrum, is presented, including the planet's formation and migration, its long-term thermodynamic evolution, a variety of disk chemistry models, a non-gray atmospheric model, and a radiometric model to obtain simulated spectroscopic observations with James Webb Space Telescope and ARIEL.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Near-UV Absorption, Chromospheric Activity, and Star-Planet Interactions in the WASP-12 system
Carole A. Haswell,Luca Fossati,Thomas R. Ayres,Cynthia S. Froning,S. Holmes,Ulrich Kolb,R. Busuttil,R. A. Street,Leslie Hebb,A. Collier Cameron,B. Enoch,Vadim Burwitz,J. L. Rodriguez,Richard G. West,D. L. Pollacco,Peter J. Wheatley,Aarynn L. Carter +16 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors observed the extreme close-in hot Jupiter system WASP-12 with HST and revealed significantly enhanced absorption (greater than 3σigma below the median) at ~200 wavelengths on each of two HST visits; 65 of these wavelengths are consistent between the two visits, using a strict criterion for velocity matching which excludes matches with velocity shifts exceeding 20 km/s.
Journal ArticleDOI
Transmission Spectroscopy of the Hot Jupiter WASP-12b from 0.7 to 5 μm
Kevin B. Stevenson,Jacob L. Bean,Andreas Seifahrt,Jean-Michel Desert,Nikku Madhusudhan,Marcel Bergmann,Laura Kreidberg,Derek Homeier +7 more
TL;DR: In this paper, a ground-based multi-object transmission-spectroscopy observations of WASP-12b were obtained over two consecutive nights in the red optical with Gemini-N/GMOS.
Journal ArticleDOI
Transmission Spectra of Three-Dimensional Hot Jupiter Model Atmospheres
J. J. Fortney,Megan Shabram,Adam P. Showman,Yuan Lian,Richard S. Freedman,Richard S. Freedman,Mark S. Marley,Nikole K. Lewis +7 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the effects of temperature, surface gravity, and metallicity for the generic planets as a guide to understanding transmission spectra in general were examined for both one-dimensional and three-dimensional model atmospheres and examined the differences between them.
Journal ArticleDOI
Carbon monoxide and water vapor in the atmosphere of the non-transiting exoplanet HD 179949 b
TL;DR: In this article, the authors detect molecular absorption from carbon monoxide and water vapor with a combined signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) of 6.3 μ m, obtained at a resolution of R ~ 100 000 during three nights of observations with CRIRES at the VLT.
Journal ArticleDOI
Transmission Spectroscopy of the Hot-Jupiter WASP-12b from 0.7 to 5 microns
Kevin B. Stevenson,Jacob L. Bean,Andreas Seifahrt,Jean-Michel Desert,Nikku Madhusudhan,M. Bergmann,Laura Kreidberg,Derek Homeier +7 more
TL;DR: In this paper, a ground-based multi-object transmission-spectroscopy observations of WASP-12b were obtained over two consecutive nights in the red optical with Gemini-N/GMOS.
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