Water vapour in the atmosphere of a transiting extrasolar planet

By Giovanna Tinetti, A. Vidal-Madjar, M. Liang, J. Beaulieu, Yuk L. Yung, S. Carey, R. Barber, Jonathan Tennyson, I. Ribas, N. Allard and 3 more. Nature, 2007

673 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Water is predicted to be among the most abundant (if not the most abundant) molecular species after hydrogen in the atmospheres of close-in extrasolar giant planets (‘hot Jupiters’). Several attempts have been made to detect water on such planets, but have either failed to find compelling evidence for it or led to claims that should be taken with caution. Here we report an analysis of recent observations of the hot Jupiter HD 189733b (ref. 6) taken during the transit, when the planet passed in front of its parent star. We find that absorption by water vapour is the most likely cause of the wavelength-dependent variations in the effective radius of the planet at the infrared wavelengths 3.6 μm, 5.8 μm (both ref. 7) and 8 μm (ref. 8). The larger effective radius observed at visible wavelengths may arise from either stellar variability or the presence of clouds/hazes. We explain the report of a non-detection of water on HD 189733b (ref. 4) as being a consequence of the nearly isothermal vertical profile of the planet’s atmosphere.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1d27f2fb298b98abfb28f7f23d9125b16480da74

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. N. Madhusudhan
2. Jon Fortney
3. A. Showman
4. M. Marley
5. Sara Seager
6. D. Deming
7. H. Knutson
8. D. Charbonneau

Citations in the corpus

• ATMOSPHERIC CIRCULATION OF HOT JUPITERS: COUPLED RADIATIVE-DYNAMICAL GENERAL CIRCULATION MODEL SIMULATIONS OF HD 189733b and HD 209458b (2008, neutral): “For HD 189733b, the inferred water abundance (Tinetti et al. 2007; Swain et al. 2008b) is consistent with near-solar metallicity for both water and carbon (Showman 2008).”
• Detection of atmospheric haze on an extrasolar planet: the 0.55–1.05 μm transmission spectrum of HD 189733b with the Hubble Space Telescope (2007, methodology): “Tinetti et al. (2007) present a complete model of the transmission spectrum fitted to the mid-infrared data (Spitzer bands at 3.6, 5.8 and 8 µm), and predict very strong features at shorter wavelengths for an atmosphere without condensates.”
• IUPAC critical evaluation of the rotational-vibrational spectra of water vapor, Part III: Energy levels and transition (2013, background): “As for astrophysics, lines and levels are crucial to interpret maser sources [7–9], comets [10], planets [11], exoplanets [12], cool stars [13], carbon stars [14], and interstellar clouds [15,16].”
• A TEMPERATURE AND ABUNDANCE RETRIEVAL METHOD FOR EXOPLANET ATMOSPHERES (2009, background): “Water vapor was also inferred in transmission at the 3.6 µm, 5.8 µm, and 8 µm in HD 189733b (Tinetti et al. 2007) (but c.f. Desert et al. 2009, and also Beaulieu et al. 2009).”
• SEARCH FOR CARBON MONOXIDE IN THE ATMOSPHERE OF THE TRANSITING EXOPLANET HD 189733b (2009, background): “3, we describe the model and techniques used to estimate the physical and orbital parameters of HD189733b.”
• Theoretical Spectral Models of the Planet HD 209458b with a Thermal Inversion and Water Emission Bands (2007, background): “In this way, sodium (Charbonneau et al. 2002) and water (Barman 2007) have been identified in HD 209458b and water has been identified in HD 189733b (Tinetti et al. 2007) and in TrES-1 (Burrows, Hubeny, & Sudarsky 2005).”
• THE EFFECTS OF SNOWLINES ON C/O IN PLANETARY ATMOSPHERES (2011, background): “The atmospheres of these ‘hot Jupiters’ are predicted to be abundant in H2O, CH4 and CO (Fortney et al. 2010), and observations qualitatively confirm these predictions (Richardson et al. 2006; Tinetti et al. 2007; Grillmair et al. 2008; Swain et al. 2010).”
• A Unified Theory for the Atmospheres of the Hot and Very Hot Jupiters: Two Classes of Irradiated Atmospheres (2007, background): “Characterization Via Transit Observations Primary transit observations for pL Class planets HD 209458b and HD 189733b have yielded detections of sodium (Charbonneau et al. 2002) and water vapor (Barman 2007; Tinetti et al. 2007).”
• TRANSITS OF EARTH-LIKE PLANETS (2009, background): “…even absorption features of planetary upper-atmospheric constituents: sodium (Charbonneau et al. 2002), hydrogen (Vidal-Madjar et al. 2003), water (Tinetti et al. 2007,(disputed by Ehrenreich et al. 2007), Beaulieu et al 2008, Swain et al. 2008) and methane (Swain et al. 2008), showing that the…”
• A SYSTEMATIC RETRIEVAL ANALYSIS OF SECONDARY ECLIPSE SPECTRA. I. A COMPARISON OF ATMOSPHERIC RETRIEVAL TECHNIQUES (2013, background): “If CO2 is the dominant species, C/O will be 1/2.”
• Potential Biosignatures in Super-Earth Atmospheres (2010, methodology): “…have been already spectroscopically characterised with the Hubble Space Telscope (HST) and the Spitzer IRtelescope (e.g. Vidal-Madjar et al. 2004, Tinetti et al. 2007, Swain et al. 2008, Knutson et al. 2008, Swain et al. 2009, Knutson et al. 2009), terrestrial extra-sol r planets seem out of…”
• DISEQUILIBRIUM CARBON, OXYGEN, AND NITROGEN CHEMISTRY IN THE ATMOSPHERES OF HD 189733b AND HD 209458b (2011, methodology): “…can allow identification of atmospheric constituents on “hot Jupiter” exoplanets (e.g., Charbonneau et al. 2002; Vidal-Madjar et al. 2003; Tinetti et al. 2007; Grillmair et al. 2008; Swain et al. 2008b, 2009a; Madhusudhan & Seager 2009), allowing a better understanding of the chemical…”
• A variationally computed line list for hot NH3 (2010, background): “Water and methane have already been shown to be present in exoplanet atmospheres (for example in HD 189733b (Tinetti et al. 2007; Swain et al. 2008)), but to-date NH3 has not.”