The Complete Transmission Spectrum of WASP-39b with a Precise Water Constraint

Wakeford, Hannah R.; Sing, David K.; Deming, Drake; Lewis, Nikole K.; Goyal, Jayesh; Wilson, Tom J.; Barstow, Joanna K.; Kataria, Tiffany; Drummond, Benjamin; Evans, T. M.; Carter, Aarynn L.; Nikolov, Nikolay; Knutson, Heather A.; Ballester, G. E.; Mandell, Avi M.

doi:10.3847/1538-3881/aa9e4e

Cited by 190 publications

(279 citation statements)

References 64 publications

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“…In the ice giants and mini-Neptunes the median abundances are nearly stellar, with the exception of HAT-P-26b and HAT-P-11b, which are significantly superstellar and substellar, respectively. An exception is the hot Saturn WASP-39b for which anomalously high H 2 O was reported with the latest data (Wakeford et al 2018;Kirk et al 2019). We find its abundance estimates to be sensitive to the choice of priors; we report two estimates with different priors in Table 1.…”

Section: N/amentioning

confidence: 91%

Mass–Metallicity Trends in Transiting Exoplanets from Atmospheric Abundances of H₂O, Na, and K

Welbanks

Madhusudhan

Allard

et al. 2019

ApJL

176

178

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Atmospheric compositions can provide powerful diagnostics of formation and migration histories of planetary systems. We investigate constraints on atmospheric abundances of H 2 O, Na, and K, in a sample of transiting exoplanets using latest transmission spectra and new H 2 broadened opacities of Na and K. Our sample of 19 exoplanets spans from cool mini-Neptunes to hot Jupiters, with equilibrium temperatures between ∼300 and 2700 K. Using homogeneous Bayesian retrievals we report atmospheric abundances of Na, K, and H 2 O, and their detection significances, confirming 6 planets with strong Na detections, 6 with K, and 14 with H 2 O. We find a mass-metallicity trend of increasing H 2 O abundances with decreasing mass, spanning generally substellar values for gas giants and stellar/superstellar for Neptunes and mini-Neptunes. However, the overall trend in H 2 O abundances, from mini-Neptunes to hot Jupiters, is significantly lower than the mass-metallicity relation for carbon in the solar system giant planets and similar predictions for exoplanets. On the other hand, the Na and K abundances for the gas giants are stellar or superstellar, consistent with each other, and generally consistent with the solar system metallicity trend. The H 2 O abundances in hot gas giants are likely due to low oxygen abundances relative to other elements rather than low overall metallicities, and provide new constraints on their formation mechanisms. The differing trends in the abundances of species argue against the use of chemical equilibrium models with metallicity as one free parameter in atmospheric retrievals, as different elements can be differently enhanced.

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Section: N/amentioning

confidence: 91%

Mass–Metallicity Trends in Transiting Exoplanets from Atmospheric Abundances of H₂O, Na, and K

Welbanks

Madhusudhan

Allard

et al. 2019

ApJL

176

178

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“…We therefore opt to remove these data from our analysis in line with many other studies (e.g. Knutson et al 2014;Sing et al 2016;Wakeford et al 2018;Mikal-Evans et al 2019) that have been performed since the first spatial scanning WFC3 transit observations were made (Deming et al 2013).…”

Section: Light Curve Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Detection of Na, K, and H2O in the hazy atmosphere of WASP-6b

Carter

Nikolov

Sing

et al. 2020

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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We present new observations of the transmission spectrum of the hot Jupiter WASP-6b both from the ground with the Very Large Telescope (VLT ) FOcal Reducer and Spectrograph (FORS2) from 0.45-0.83 µm, and space with the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS ) from 0.6-1.0 µm and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST ) Wide Field Camera 3 from 1.12-1.65 µm. Archival data from the HST Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) and Spitzer is also reanalysed on a common Gaussian process framework, of which the STIS data show a good overall agreement with the overlapping FORS2 data. We also explore the effects of stellar heterogeneity on our observations and its resulting implications towards determining the atmospheric characteristics of WASP-6b. Independent of our assumptions for the level of stellar heterogeneity we detect Na i, K i and H 2 O absorption features and constrain the elemental oxygen abundance to a value of [O/H] −0.9 ± 0.3 relative to solar. In contrast, we find that the stellar heterogeneity correction can have significant effects on the retrieved distributions of the [Na/H] and [K/H] abundances, primarily through its degeneracy with the sloping optical opacity of scattering haze species within the atmosphere. Our results also show that despite this presence of haze, WASP-6b remains a favourable object for future atmospheric characterisation with upcoming missions such as the James Webb Space Telescope.

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“…c (Wakeford et al 2018) We used a Differential Evolution Markov Chain (DE-MC) to explore the parameter space, and we minimize the wavelet-based likelihood function to obtain the posterior distributions of all fitted parameters. We used the Python library MC 3 (Cubillos et al 2017) with 12 parallel chains, each consisting of roughly 170,000 steps (2 million steps in total).…”

Section: Model # Baseline Functionmentioning

confidence: 99%

HST/STIS Capability for Love Number Measurement of WASP-121b

Hellard

Csizmadia

Padovan

et al. 2020

ApJ

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Data from transit light curves, radial velocity and transit timing observations can be used to probe the interiors of exoplanets beyond the mean density, by measuring the Love numbers h 2 and k 2 . The first indirect estimate of k 2 for an exoplanet from radial velocity and transit timing variations observations has been performed by taking advantage of the years-spanning baseline. Not a single measurement of h 2 has been achieved from transit light curves, mostly because the photometric precision of current observing facilities is still too low. We show that the Imaging Spectrograph instrument on-board the Hubble Space Telescope could measure h 2 of the hot Jupiter WASP-121b if only few more observations were gathered. We show that a careful treatment of the noise and stellar limb darkening must be carried out to achieve a measurement of h 2 . In particular, we find that the impact of the noise modelling on the estimation of h 2 is stronger than the impact of the limb darkening modelling. In addition, we emphasize that the wavelet method for correlated noise analysis can mask limb brightening. Finally, using presently available data, we briefly discuss the tentative measurement of h 2 = 1.39 +0.71 −0.81 in terms of interior structure. Additional observations would further constrain the interior of WASP-121b and possibly provide insights on the physics of inflation. The possibility of using the approach presented here with the Hubble Space Telescope provides a bridge before the high-quality data to be returned by the James Webb Space Telescope and PLATO telescope in the coming decade.

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The Complete Transmission Spectrum of WASP-39b with a Precise Water Constraint

Cited by 190 publications

References 64 publications

Mass–Metallicity Trends in Transiting Exoplanets from Atmospheric Abundances of H₂O, Na, and K

Mass–Metallicity Trends in Transiting Exoplanets from Atmospheric Abundances of H₂O, Na, and K

Detection of Na, K, and H2O in the hazy atmosphere of WASP-6b

HST/STIS Capability for Love Number Measurement of WASP-121b

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The Complete Transmission Spectrum of WASP-39b with a Precise Water Constraint

Cited by 190 publications

References 64 publications

Mass–Metallicity Trends in Transiting Exoplanets from Atmospheric Abundances of H2O, Na, and K

Mass–Metallicity Trends in Transiting Exoplanets from Atmospheric Abundances of H2O, Na, and K

Detection of Na, K, and H2O in the hazy atmosphere of WASP-6b

HST/STIS Capability for Love Number Measurement of WASP-121b

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About

Mass–Metallicity Trends in Transiting Exoplanets from Atmospheric Abundances of H₂O, Na, and K

Mass–Metallicity Trends in Transiting Exoplanets from Atmospheric Abundances of H₂O, Na, and K