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
TLDR
In this paper, the authors reported WFC3 spectroscopy of the giant planets HD 209458b and XO-1b in transit, using spatial scanning mode for maximum photon-collecting efficiency.Abstract:
Exoplanetary transmission spectroscopy in the near-infrared using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) NICMOS is currently ambiguous because different observational groups claim different results from the same data, depending on their analysis methodologies. Spatial scanning with HST/WFC3 provides an opportunity to resolve this ambiguity. We here report WFC3 spectroscopy of the giant planets HD 209458b and XO-1b in transit, using spatial scanning mode for maximum photon-collecting efficiency. We introduce an analysis technique that derives the exoplanetary transmission spectrum without the necessity of explicitly decorrelating instrumental effects, and achieves nearly photon-limited precision even at the high flux levels collected in spatial scan mode. Our errors are within 6% (XO-1) and 26% (HD 209458b) of the photon-limit at a resolving power of λ/δλ ~ 70, and are better than 0.01% per spectral channel. Both planets exhibit water absorption of approximately 200 ppm at the water peak near 1.38 μm. Our result for XO-1b contradicts the much larger absorption derived from NICMOS spectroscopy. The weak water absorption we measure for HD 209458b is reminiscent of the weakness of sodium absorption in the first transmission spectroscopy of an exoplanet atmosphere by Charbonneau et al. Model atmospheres having uniformly distributed extra opacity of 0.012 cm2 g−1 account approximately for both our water measurement and the sodium absorption. Our results for HD 209458b support the picture advocated by Pont et al. in which weak molecular absorptions are superposed on a transmission spectrum that is dominated by continuous opacity due to haze and/or dust. However, the extra opacity needed for HD 209458b is grayer than for HD 189733b, with a weaker Rayleigh component.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Signatures of Nitrogen Chemistry in Hot Jupiter Atmospheres
TL;DR: In this article, the detectability of nitrogen chemistry in exoplanetary atmospheres was examined, and it was shown that high-precision observations from 1-5$\mu$m spectral range possible for a typical hot Jupiter.
Journal ArticleDOI
Exo-Transmit: An Open-Source Code for Calculating Transmission Spectra for Exoplanet Atmospheres of Varied Composition
TL;DR: Exo-Transmit as mentioned in this paper is a software package to calculate exoplanet transmission spectra for planets of varied composition, including hot Jupiters and super-Earths.
Journal ArticleDOI
Forward modelling and retrievals with PLATON, a fast open source tool
TL;DR: PLATON as mentioned in this paper is a Python package that calculates transmission spectra for exoplanets and retrieves atmospheric characteristics based on observed spectra, such as temperature, metallicity, C/O ratio, cloud-top pressure, and scattering slope.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Effects of Stellar Activity on Optical High-resolution Exoplanet Transmission Spectra
P. Wilson Cauley,Christoph Kuckein,Seth Redfield,Evgenya L. Shkolnik,Carsten Denker,Joe Llama,Meetu Verma +6 more
Book ChapterDOI
Exoplanet Atmosphere Measurements from Transmission Spectroscopy and Other Planet Star Combined Light Observations
TL;DR: In this article, the basic techniques used to characterize transiting exoplanets -transmission spectroscopy, emission and reflection spectroscopic, and full-orbit phase curve observations -were discussed, including current and future observing facilities and best practices for measuring precise spectra.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Analytic Lightcurves for Planetary Transit Searches
Kaisey S. Mandel,Eric Agol +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, exact analytic formulae for the eclipse of a star described by quadratic or nonlinear limb darkening are presented for the HST observations of HD 209458, showing that the ratio of the planetary to stellar radii is 0.1207+-0.0003.
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Analytic Light Curves for Planetary Transit Searches
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TL;DR: In this paper, the exact analytic formulae for the eclipse of a star described by quadratic or nonlinear limb darkening were presented, and the authors applied these results to the Hubble Space Telescope observations of HD 209458, showing that the ratio of the planetary to stellar radii is 0.1207 ± 0.0003.
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