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

By H. Wakeford, D. Sing, D. Deming, N. Lewis, J. Goyal, T. Wilson, J. Barstow, T. Kataria, B. Drummond, T. Evans and 5 more. 2017

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WASP-39b is a hot Saturn-mass exoplanet with a predicted clear atmosphere based on observations in the optical and infrared. Here, we complete the transmission spectrum of the atmosphere with observations in the near-infrared (NIR) over three water absorption features with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) G102 (0.8–1.1 μm) and G141 (1.1–1.7 μm) spectroscopic grisms. We measure the predicted high-amplitude H2O feature centered at 1.4 μm and the smaller amplitude features at 0.95 and 1.2 μm, with a maximum water absorption amplitude of 2.4 planetary scale heights. We incorporate these new NIR measurements into previously published observational measurements to complete the transmission spectrum from 0.3 to 5 μm. From these observed water features, combined with features in the optical and IR, we retrieve a well constrained temperature Teq = 1030 K, and atmospheric metallicity solar, which is relatively high with respect to the currently established mass–metallicity trends. This new measurement in the Saturn-mass range hints at further diversity in the planet formation process relative to our solar system giants.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b60c607c9127656ffab0a017dac4a0049e862667

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

  1. N. Madhusudhan
  2. R. MacDonald
  3. Arazi Pinhas
  4. S. Gandhi
  5. D. Deming
  6. M. Line
  7. Jon Fortney
  8. H. Knutson

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