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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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.
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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
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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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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors report an analysis of transit spectroscopy of the extrasolar planets WASP-12 b, WASP17 b, and WASP19 b using the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).
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DECIPHERING THE ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION OF WASP-12b: A COMPREHENSIVE ANALYSIS OF ITS DAYSIDE EMISSION
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Nikku Madhusudhan,Nicolas Crouzet,Nicolas Crouzet,Peter R. McCullough,Peter R. McCullough,Drake Deming,Christina Hedges +6 more
TL;DR: In this article, the atmospheric H2O bundances in three hot Jupiters (HD 189733b, HD 209458b, and WASP-12b), spanning a wide temperature range (1200-2500 K), using their near-infrared transmission spectra obtained using the HST WFC3 instrument.
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