INFERENCE OF INHOMOGENEOUS CLOUDS IN AN EXOPLANET ATMOSPHERE

By B. Demory, J. de Wit, N. Lewis, Jon Fortney, A. Zsom, Sara Seager, H. Knutson, K. Heng, N. Madhusudhan, M. Gillon and 4 more. 2013

194 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present new visible and infrared observations of the hot Jupiter Kepler-7b to determine its atmospheric properties. Our analysis allows us to (1) refine Kepler-7b's relatively large geometric albedo of Ag = 0.35 ± 0.02, (2) place upper limits on Kepler-7b thermal emission that remains undetected in both Spitzer bandpasses and (3) report a westward shift in the Kepler optical phase curve. We argue that Kepler-7b's visible flux cannot be due to thermal emission or Rayleigh scattering from H2 molecules. We therefore conclude that high altitude, optically reflective clouds located west from the substellar point are present in its atmosphere. We find that a silicate-based cloud composition is a possible candidate. Kepler-7b exhibits several properties that may make it particularly amenable to cloud formation in its upper atmosphere. These include a hot deep atmosphere that avoids a cloud cold trap, very low surface gravity to suppress cloud sedimentation, and a planetary equilibrium temperature in a range that allows for silicate clouds to potentially form in the visible atmosphere probed by Kepler. Our analysis does not only present evidence of optically thick clouds on Kepler-7b but also yields the first map of clouds in an exoplanet atmosphere.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/61119de17e7c418c538481056d49eaef7890a3f8

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Jon Fortney
2. N. Madhusudhan
3. A. Showman
4. M. Line
5. V. Parmentier
6. Laura Kreidberg
7. J. D'esert
8. M. Marley

In Instrumentation

1. Jon Fortney
2. N. Madhusudhan
3. A. Showman
4. V. Parmentier
5. M. Line
6. Laura Kreidberg
7. J. D'esert
8. M. Marley

Citations in the corpus

• TRANSITIONS IN THE CLOUD COMPOSITION OF HOT JUPITERS (2016, methodology): “Unlike previous work (Demory et al. 2013; Hu et al. 2015; Webber et al. 2015; Shporer & Hu 2015; Munoz & Isaak 2015) that aimed to fit ad-hoc cloud models to the Kepler lightcurves by treating the condensation curve of the cloud, the thermal structure of the planet, or the optical properties of the…”
• THE INFLUENCE OF NONUNIFORM CLOUD COVER ON TRANSIT TRANSMISSION SPECTRA (2015, background): “…from the Kepler spacecraft are strongly suggestive of inhomogeneous dayside cloud coverage, with cloudy western daysides and clear eastern daysides (Demory et al. 2013, Shporer & Hu 2015; Hu et al. 2015; Esteves et al. 2015; Parmentier et al. 2015, submitted), very much in agreement with…”
• Global Climate and Atmospheric Composition of the Ultra-hot Jupiter WASP-103b from HST and Spitzer Phase Curve Observations (2018, methodology): “…infrared measurements were complemented by optical phase curves from Kepler that show evidence for reflected light from patchy and possibly variable dayside clouds with a range of compositions (Borucki et al. 2009; Demory et al. 2013; Hu et al. 2015; Armstrong et al. 2016; Parmentier et al. 2016).”