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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Evidence for multiple molecular species in the hot Jupiter HD 209458b
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors confirm potential detections of CO and H$_2$O in the hot Jupiter HD 209458b using high-resolution spectroscopy and report a cross-correlation peak with a signal-to-noise ratio of $4.7$ from a search for HCN.
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Spectral Resolution-linked Bias in Transit Spectroscopy of Extrasolar Planets
TL;DR: In this article, the authors re-visit the principles of transmission spectroscopy for transiting extrasolar planets, focusing on the overlap between the planetary spectrum and the illuminating stellar spectrum.
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Phase-curve Pollution of Exoplanet Transmission Spectra
TL;DR: In this article, the effects of the approximation on transmission spectra over the 0.6-12 $\mu$m wavelength range covered by various JWST instruments are analyzed. And the authors present open source software to predict the spectral bias, showing that, if not corrected, it may affect the inferred molecular abundances and thermal structure of some exoplanet atmospheres.
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The air over there: exploring exoplanet atmospheres.
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TL;DR: In this paper, a series of new space and ground-based observatories over the coming decade will revolutionize the precision and spectral resolution with which we are able to probe exoplanet atmospheres.
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SPORK That Spectrum: Increasing Detection Significances from High-resolution Exoplanet Spectroscopy with Novel Smoothing Algorithms
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors take two examples of CRIRES emission spectroscopy taken of HD 209458 b and HD 179949 b, and apply SPORK (SPectral cOntinuum Refinement for telluriKs) and iterative smoothing to boost the detection significance from 5.78 to 9.71 σ, and from 4.38 σ to 6.89 σ , respectively.
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
Kaisey S. Mandel,Eric Agol +1 more
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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