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Published February 23, 2023 | Published
Journal Article Open

Early Release Science of the exoplanet WASP-39b with JWST NIRISS

Feinstein, Adina D. ORCID icon
Radica, Michael ORCID icon
Welbanks, Luis ORCID icon
Murray, Catriona Anne ORCID icon
Ohno, Kazumasa ORCID icon
Coulombe, Louis-Philippe
Espinoza, Néstor ORCID icon
Bean, Jacob L. ORCID icon
Teske, Johanna K.
Benneke, Björn ORCID icon
Line, Michael R. ORCID icon
Rustamkulov, Zafar ORCID icon
Saba, Arianna ORCID icon
Tsiaras, Angelos ORCID icon
Barstow, Joanna K. ORCID icon
Fortney, Jonathan J. ORCID icon
Gao, Peter ORCID icon
Knutson, Heather A. ORCID icon
MacDonald, Ryan J. ORCID icon
Mikal-Evans, Thomas ORCID icon
Rackham, Benjamin V. ORCID icon
Taylor, Jake ORCID icon
Parmentier, Vivien ORCID icon
Batalha, Natalie M. ORCID icon
Berta-Thompson, Zachory K. ORCID icon
Carter, Aarynn L. ORCID icon
Changeat, Quentin ORCID icon
dos Santos, Leonardo A. ORCID icon
Gibson, Neale P. ORCID icon
Goyal, Jayesh M. ORCID icon
Kreidberg, Laura ORCID icon
López-Morales, Mercedes ORCID icon
Lothringer, Joshua D. ORCID icon
Miguel, Yamila ORCID icon
Molaverdikhani, Karan ORCID icon
Moran, Sarah E. ORCID icon
Morello, Giuseppe ORCID icon
Mukherjee, Sagnick ORCID icon
Sing, David K. ORCID icon
Stevenson, Kevin B. ORCID icon
Wakeford, Hannah R. ORCID icon
Ahrer, Eva-Maria ORCID icon
Alam, Munazza K. ORCID icon
Alderson, Lili ORCID icon
Allen, Natalie H. ORCID icon
Batalha, Natasha E. ORCID icon
Bell, Taylor J. ORCID icon
Blecic, Jasmina ORCID icon
Brande, Jonathan ORCID icon
Caceres, Claudio ORCID icon
Casewell, S. L. ORCID icon
Chubb, Katy L. ORCID icon
Crossfield, Ian J. M. ORCID icon
Crouzet, Nicolas ORCID icon
Cubillos, Patricio E. ORCID icon
Decin, Leen ORCID icon
Désert, Jean-Michel ORCID icon
Harrington, Joseph ORCID icon
Heng, Kevin ORCID icon
Henning, Thomas ORCID icon
Iro, Nicolas ORCID icon
Kempton, Eliza M.-R. ORCID icon
Kendrew, Sarah ORCID icon
Kirk, James ORCID icon
Krick, Jessica ORCID icon
Lagage, Pierre-Olivier
Lendl, Monika ORCID icon
Mancini, Luigi ORCID icon
Mansfield, Megan ORCID icon
May, E. M.
Mayne, N. J. ORCID icon
Nikolov, Nikolay K. ORCID icon
Palle, Enric ORCID icon
Petit dit de la Roche, Dominique J. M. ORCID icon
Piaulet, Caroline ORCID icon
Powell, Diana ORCID icon
Redfield, Seth ORCID icon
Rogers, Laura K.
Roman, Michael T. ORCID icon
Roy, Pierre-Alexis ORCID icon
Nixon, Matthew C. ORCID icon
Schlawin, Everett ORCID icon
Tan, Xianyu ORCID icon
Tremblin, P. ORCID icon
Turner, Jake D. ORCID icon
Venot, Olivia ORCID icon
Waalkes, William C. ORCID icon
Wheatley, Peter J. ORCID icon
Zhang, Xi

Abstract

The Saturn-mass exoplanet WASP-39b has been the subject of extensive efforts to determine its atmospheric properties using transmission spectroscopy. However, these efforts have been hampered by modelling degeneracies between composition and cloud properties that are caused by limited data quality. Here we present the transmission spectrum of WASP-39b obtained using the Single-Object Slitless Spectroscopy (SOSS) mode of the Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) instrument on the JWST. This spectrum spans 0.6–2.8 μm in wavelength and shows several water-absorption bands, the potassium resonance doublet and signatures of clouds. The precision and broad wavelength coverage of NIRISS/SOSS allows us to break model degeneracies between cloud properties and the atmospheric composition of WASP-39b, favouring a heavy-element enhancement ('metallicity') of about 10–30 times the solar value, a sub-solar carbon-to-oxygen (C/O) ratio and a solar-to-super-solar potassium-to-oxygen (K/O) ratio. The observations are also best explained by wavelength-dependent, non-grey clouds with inhomogeneous coverage of the planet's terminator.

Additional Information

© The Author(s) 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. This work is based on observations made with the NASA/ESA/CSA JWST. The data were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-03127 for the JWST. These observations are associated with programme no. 1366. Support for this programme was provided by NASA through a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute. A.D.F. acknowledges support by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships Program under grant no. DGE-1746045. M.R. acknowledges support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Fonds de Recherche du Québec, as well as the Institut de Recherche sur les Exoplanètes. This research made use of ccdproc, an Astropy package for image reduction. This research made use of Photutils, an Astropy package for the detection and photometry of astronomical sources. This research has made use of NASA's Astrophysics Data System Bibliographic Services. Contributions. All authors played a substantial role in producing the results of this manuscript. Those roles include: developing the original JWST Early Release Science proposal, management of the project, definition of the target list, designing the observation plan, reduction and analysis of the data, theoretical modelling and preparation of this manuscript. Some specific contributions are listed as follows. N.M.B., J.L.B. and K.B.S. provided overall programme leadership and management. A.D.F., M.R., L.W. and J.L.B. led the efforts for this manuscript. D.K.S., E.M.-R.K., H.R.W., I.J.M.C., J.L.B., K.B.S., L.K., M.L.-M., M.R.L., N.M.B., V.P. and Z.K.B.-T. made notable contributions to the design of the programme. K.B.S. generated the observing plan, with input from the team. N.E. provided instrument expertise. B.B., E.M.-R.K., H.R.W., I.J.M.C., J.L.B., L.K., M.L.-M., M.R.L., N.M.B. and Z.K.B.-T. led or co-led working groups and/or contributed to substantial strategic planning efforts, such as the design and implementation of the prelaunch Data Challenges. A.L.C., D.K.S., E.S., N.E., N.P.G. and V.P. generated simulated data for prelaunch testing of methods. A.D.F., M.R., L.W., C.A.M., K.O., J.L.B. and J.T. contributed substantially to the writing of this manuscript, along with contributions in Methods from L.-P.C., B.B., Z.R., A.S. and A.T. A.D.F., M.R., C.A.M., L.-P.C., N.E., Z.R., A.S. and A.T. contributed to the development of data-analysis pipelines and/or provided the data-analysis products used in this analysis, that is, reduced the data, modelled the light curves and/or produced the planetary spectrum. L.W., K.O., M.R.L. and S.M. generated theoretical model grids for comparison with data. A.D.F., L.W. and K.O. generated figures for this manuscript. J.B., L.A.D.S., J.J.F., P.G., H.A.K., R.J.M., T.M.-E., B.V.R. and V.P. provided notable feedback to the manuscript, coordinating comments from all other authors. Data availability. The raw data from this study are publicly available at the Space Telescope Science Institute's Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (https://archive.stsci.edu/). The data used to create all of the figures in this manuscript are freely available on Zenodo and GitHub (Zenodo link: https://github.com/afeinstein20/wasp39b_niriss_paper). All further data are available on request. Code availability. The following are open-source pipelines written in Python available either through the Python Package Index (PyPI) or GitHub that were used throughout this work: Eureka! (https://github.com/kevin218/Eureka); nirHiss (https://github.com/afeinstein20/nirhiss); supreme-SPOON (https://github.com/radicamc/supreme-spoon); transitspectroscopy (https://github.com/nespinoza/transitspectroscopy/tree/dev); iraclis (https://github.com/ucl-exoplanets/Iraclis); juliet (https://github.com/nespinoza/juliet); chromatic (https://github.com/zkbt/chromatic); chromatic_fitting (https://github.com/catrionamurray/chromatic_fitting); ExoTiC-LD13,57 (https://github.com/Exo-TiC/ExoTiC-LD); ExoTETHyS125 (https://github.com/ucl-exoplanets/ExoTETHyS); PICASO92,93 (https://github.com/natashabatalha/picaso); Virga98,99 (https://github.com/natashabatalha/virga); CHIMERA (https://github.com/mrline/CHIMERA); PyMultiNest (https://github.com/JohannesBuchner/PyMultiNest); MultiNest (https://github.com/JohannesBuchner/MultiNest). The authors declare no competing interests.

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Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
February 2, 2024