HST PanCET Program: A Cloudy Atmosphere for the Promising JWST Target WASP-101b

By H. Wakeford, Kevin B. Stevenson, N. Lewis, D. Sing, Mercedes López-Morales, M. Marley, T. Kataria, A. Mandell, Gilda E. Ballester, J. Barstow and 12 more. 2017

29 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present results from the first observations of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Panchromatic Comparative Exoplanet Treasury program for WASP-101b, a highly inflated hot Jupiter and one of the community targets proposed for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Early Release Science (ERS) program. From a single HST Wide Field Camera 3 observation, we find that the near-infrared transmission spectrum of WASP-101b contains no significant H2O absorption features and we rule out a clear atmosphere at 13σ. Therefore, WASP-101b is not an optimum target for a JWST ERS program aimed at observing strong molecular transmission features. We compare WASP-101b to the well-studied and nearly identical hot Jupiter WASP-31b. These twin planets show similar temperature–pressure profiles and atmospheric features in the near-infrared. We suggest exoplanets in the same parameter space as WASP-101b and WASP-31b will also exhibit cloudy transmission spectral features. For future HST exoplanet studies, our analysis also suggests that a lower count limit needs to be exceeded per pixel on the detector in order to avoid unwanted instrumental systematics.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

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Citations in the corpus

The Complete Transmission Spectrum of WASP-39b with a Precise Water Constraint (2017, methodology): “We note that this model is for a 1×solar composition case and with an increased atmospheric metallicity the temperature is likely to increase as well as the position of the condensation curves (Wakeford et al. 2017).”
A Population Study of Gaseous Exoplanets (2017, methodology): “…b (Damiano et al. 2017), HD 209458 b (Deming et al. 2013), HD 189733 b (McCullough et al. 2014), WASP12 b (Kreidberg et al. 2015), WASP-31 b (Sing et al. 2015), WASP-43 b (Kreidberg et al. 2014a), WASP-101 b (Wakeford et al. 2017), WASP-121 b (Evans et al. 2016) and XO-1 b (Deming et al. 2013).”