HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE NEAR-IR TRANSMISSION SPECTROSCOPY OF THE SUPER-EARTH HD 97658B
By H. Knutson, D. Dragomir, Laura Kreidberg, Eliza Miller-Ricci Kempton, P. McCullough, Jon Fortney, J. Bean, M. Gillon, Derek Homeier, Andrew W. Howard. 2014
147 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Recent results from the Kepler mission indicate that super-Earths (planets with masses between 1–10 times that of the Earth) are the most common kind of planet around nearby Sun-like stars. These planets have no direct solar system analogue, and are currently one of the least well-understood classes of extrasolar planets. Many super-Earths have average densities that are consistent with a broad range of bulk compositions, including both water-dominated worlds and rocky planets covered by a thick hydrogen and helium atmosphere. Measurements of the transmission spectra of these planets offer the opportunity to resolve this degeneracy by directly constraining the scale heights and corresponding mean molecular weights of their atmospheres. We present Hubble Space Telescope near-infrared spectroscopy of two transits of the newly discovered transiting super-Earth HD 97658b. We use the Wide Field Camera 3's (WFC3) scanning mode to measure the wavelength-dependent transit depth in 30 individual bandpasses. Our averaged differential transmission spectrum has a median 1σ uncertainty of 23 ppm in individual bins, making this the most precise observation of an exoplanetary transmission spectrum obtained with WFC3 to date. Our data are inconsistent with a cloud-free solar metallicity atmosphere at the 10σ level. They are consistent at the 0.4σ level with a flat line model, as well as effectively flat models corresponding to a metal-rich atmosphere or a solar metallicity atmosphere with a cloud or haze layer located at pressures of 10 mbar or higher.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
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Citations in the corpus
- DETECTION OF AN ATMOSPHERE AROUND THE SUPER-EARTH 55 CANCRI E (2015, methodology): “Typical scan lengths in currently published datasets vary between only 20 (XO1b - scan rate of 0.05 ′′/s, Deming et al. 2013) and 170 pixels (HD97658b - scan rate of 1.4 ′′/s, Knutson et al. 2014b).”
- A Population Study of Gaseous Exoplanets (2017, background): “…Ehrenreich et al. 2014; Fraine et al. 2014; Knutson et al. 2014a; Morello et al. 2015) and super-Earths (e.g. Bean et al. 2010; Berta et al. 2012; Knutson et al. 2014b; Kreidberg et al. 2014b; Demory et al. 2016; Tsiaras et al. 2016b) allow us to learn important properties of the planets…”
- A NEW APPROACH TO ANALYZING HST SPATIAL SCANS: THE TRANSMISSION SPECTRUM OF HD 209458 b (2015, background): “…with WFC3 in staring-mode (Berta et al. 2012; Swain et al. 2013; Wilkins et al. 2014) and scanning mode (Deming et al. 2013; Kreidberg et al. 2014b; Knutson et al. 2014a) that the infrared detector introduces two time-dependent systematics to the light-curves of bright sources like HD 209458: one…”
- HD 209458b in new light: evidence of nitrogen chemistry, patchy clouds and sub-solar water (2017, background): “Given the increasing number of lowamplitude or even flat spectra observed (e.g Kreidberg et al. 2014; Knutson et al. 2014a,b; Ehrenreich et al. 2014; Sing et al. 2016) the consideration of clouds has been elevated to the forefront of transmission spectroscopy.”
- A PRECISE WATER ABUNDANCE MEASUREMENT FOR THE HOT JUPITER WASP-43b (2014, methodology): “E P] 8 O ct 2 01 4 2 Kreidberg et al. 2014) and consistent measurements with multiple anaylsis techniques (Deming et al. 2013; Kreidberg et al. 2014; Knutson et al. 2014; McCullough et al. 2014).”
- HST hot-Jupiter transmission spectral survey: detection of potassium in WASP-31b along with a cloud deck and Rayleigh scattering (2014, methodology): “Previous analyses of other HST transit observations (Berta et al. 2012; Line et al. 2013; Sing et al. 2013; Nikolov et al. 2014b; Knutson et al. 2014b) have found this to be a reasonable approximation.”
- CHARACTERIZING K2 PLANET DISCOVERIES: A SUPER-EARTH TRANSITING THE BRIGHT K DWARF HIP 116454 (2014, background): “…exoplanets around bright, nearby stars is important because measuring the precise masses and radii of transiting planets allows for characterization of their interior structures and atmospheres (Charbonneau et al. 2002; Rogers 2014; Knutson et al. 2014; Teske et al. 2013; Kreidberg et al. 2014).”
- A DETECTION OF WATER IN THE TRANSMISSION SPECTRUM OF THE HOT JUPITER WASP-12b AND IMPLICATIONS FOR ITS ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION (2015, methodology): “We also explored modeling the instrument systematics with the divide-white technique, which has been applied successfully to several other data sets (Stevenson et al. 2014c; Kreidberg et al. 2014b; Knutson et al. 2014).”
- CHARACTERIZING TRANSITING EXOPLANET ATMOSPHERES WITH JWST (2015, background): “Several measured flat exoplanet transmission spectra have been reasonably well described with such a parameterization (Line et al. 2013b; Kreidberg et al. 2014a; Knutson et al. 2014).”
- Pale Orange Dots: The Impact of Organic Haze on the Habitability and Detectability of Earthlike Exoplanets (2016, background): “We have observed evidence for hazes or clouds in the transit transmission spectra of several exoplanets (Bean et al. 2010; Sing et al. 2011; Knutson et al. 2014a,b; Kreidberg et al. 2014; de Wit et al. 2016).”