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
Reads0
Chats0
TLDR
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
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Characterizing transiting exoplanet atmospheres with jwst
Thomas P. Greene,Michael R. Line,Cezar Montero,Jonathan J. Fortney,Jacob Lustig-Yaeger,Kyle Luther +5 more
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.
Journal ArticleDOI
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
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
New chemical scheme for studying carbon-rich exoplanet atmospheres
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors have implemented a chemical scheme that can describe the kinetics of species with up to 6 carbon atoms and validated it through experiments on a wide range of T and P profiles.
Journal ArticleDOI
A Near-Infrared Transmission Spectrum for the Warm Saturn HAT-P-12b
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a HST WFC3 transmission spectrum for the transiting exoplanet HAT-P-12b and find that it lacks the expected water absorption feature for a hydrogen-dominated atmosphere, and is instead best described by a model with high-altitude clouds.
Journal ArticleDOI
On the detection of molecules in the atmosphere of HD 189733b using HST NICMOS transmission spectroscopy
TL;DR: In this paper, a uniform spectral retrieval analysis of the three independent published spectra together with null hypothesis testing was performed to confirm the original detection of molecular absorbers in the atmosphere of HD 189733b.
Journal ArticleDOI
An Analytic Radiative-Convective Model for Planetary Atmospheres
TL;DR: In this article, an analytic 1-D radiative-convective model of the thermal structure of planetary atmospheres is presented, which assumes that thermal radiative transfer is gray and can be represented by the two-stream approximation.
Journal ArticleDOI
Ground-based detections of thermal emission from CoRoT-1b and WASP-12b
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors reported a new detection of the H-band thermal emission of CoRoT-1b and two confirmation detections of the Ks-band Thermal emission of WASP-12b at secondary eclipses.
Related Papers (5)
A continuum from clear to cloudy hot-Jupiter exoplanets without primordial water depletion
David K. Sing,Jonathan J. Fortney,Nikolay Nikolov,Hannah R. Wakeford,Tiffany Kataria,Thomas M. Evans,Suzanne Aigrain,Gilda E. Ballester,Adam Burrows,Drake Deming,Jean-Michel Desert,Neale P. Gibson,Gregory W. Henry,Catherine M. Huitson,Heather Knutson,Alain Lecavelier des Etangs,Frederic Pont,Adam P. Showman,Alfred Vidal-Madjar,Michael H. Williamson,Paul Wilson +20 more
INFRARED TRANSMISSION SPECTROSCOPY OF THE EXOPLANETS HD 209458b AND XO-1b USING THE WIDE FIELD CAMERA-3 ON THE HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE
Drake Deming,Drake Deming,A. Wilkins,Peter R. McCullough,Adam Burrows,Jonathan J. Fortney,Eric Agol,Eric Agol,Ian Dobbs-Dixon,Ian Dobbs-Dixon,Nikku Madhusudhan,Nicolas Crouzet,Jean-Michel Desert,Ronald L. Gilliland,Korey Haynes,Korey Haynes,Heather Knutson,Michael R. Line,Zazralt Magic,Avi Mandell,Sukrit Ranjan,David Charbonneau,Mark Clampin,Sara Seager,Adam P. Showman +24 more
Infrared Transmission Spectroscopy of the Exoplanets HD209458b and XO-1b Using the Wide Field Camera-3 on the Hubble Space Telescope
Drake Deming,Ashlee Wilkins,Peter R. McCullough,Adam Burrows,Jonathan J. Fortney,Eric Agol,Ian Dobbs-Dixon,Nikku Madhusudhan,Nicolas Crouzet,Jean-Michel Desert,Ronald L. Gilliland,Korey Haynes,Heather Knutson,Michael R. Line,Zazralt Magic,Avi Mandell,Sukrit Ranjan,David Charbonneau,Mark Clampin,Sara Seager,Adam P. Showman +20 more