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

Creators: Rustamkulov, Z.; Sing, D. K.; Mukherjee, S.; May, E. M.; Kirkpatrick, J. Davy; Schlawin, E. A.; Line, M. R.; Piaulet, C.; Carter, A. L.; Batalha, N. E.; Goyal, J. M.; López-Morales, M.; Lothringer, J. D.; MacDonald, R. J.; Moran, S. E.; Stevenson, K. B.; Wakeford, H. R.; Espinoza, N.; Bean, J. L.; Batalha, N. M.; Benneke, B.; Berta-Thompson, Z. K.; Crossfield, I. J. M.; Gao, P.; Kreidberg, L.; Powell, D. K.; Cubillos, P. E.; Gibson, N. P.; Leconte, J.; Molaverdikhani, K.; Nikolov, N. K.; Parmentier, V.; Roy, P.; Taylor, J.; Turner, J. D.; Wheatley, P. J.; Aggarwal, K.; Ahrer, E.; Alam, M. K.; Alderson, L.; Allen, N. H.; Banerjee, A.; Barat, S.; Barrado, D.; Barstow, J. K.; Bell, T. J.; Blecic, J.; Brande, J.; Casewell, S.; Changeat, Q.; Chubb, K. L.; Crouzet, N.; Daylan, T.; Decin, L.; Desert, J.; Mikal-Evans, T.; Feinstein, A. D.; Flagg, L.; Fortney, J. J.; Harrington, J.; Heng, K.; Hong, Y.; Hu, R.; Iro, N.; Kataria, T.; Kempton, E. M.-R.; Krick, J.; Lendl, M.; Lillo-Box, J.; Louca, A.; Lustig-Yaeger, J.; Mancini, L.; Mansfield, M.; Mayne, N. J.; Miguel, Y.; Morello, G.; Ohno, K.; Palle, E.; Petit dit de la Roche, D. J. M.; Rackham, B. V.; Radica, M.; Ramos-Rosado, L.; Redfield, S.; Rogers, L. K.; Shkolnik, E. L.; Southworth, J.; Teske, J.; Tremblin, P.; Tucker, G. S.; Venot, O.; Waalkes, W. C.; Welbanks, L.; Zhang, X.; Zieba, S.

Style

An error occurred while generating the citation.

Abstract

Transmission spectroscopy of exoplanets has revealed signatures of water vapour, aerosols and alkali metals in a few dozen exoplanet atmospheres. However, these previous inferences with the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes were hindered by the observations' relatively narrow wavelength range and spectral resolving power, which precluded the unambiguous identification of other chemical species—in particular the primary carbon-bearing molecules. Here we report a broad-wavelength 0.5–5.5 µm atmospheric transmission spectrum of WASP-39b, a 1,200 K, roughly Saturn-mass, Jupiter-radius exoplanet, measured with the JWST NIRSpec's PRISM mode as part of the JWST Transiting Exoplanet Community Early Release Science Team Program. We robustly detect several chemical species at high significance, including Na (19σ), H₂O (33σ), CO₂ (28σ) and CO (7σ). The non-detection of CH₄, combined with a strong CO₂ feature, favours atmospheric models with a super-solar atmospheric metallicity. An unanticipated absorption feature at 4 µm is best explained by SO₂ (2.7σ), which could be a tracer of atmospheric photochemistry. These observations demonstrate JWST's sensitivity to a rich diversity of exoplanet compositions and chemical processes.

Additional Information

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 no. NAS 5-03127 for JWST. These observations are associated with program no. JWST-ERS-01366. Support for program no. JWST-ERS-01366 was provided by NASA through a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract no. NAS 5-03127. This work benefited from the 2022 Exoplanet Summer Program in the Other Worlds Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Cruz, a program supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation. We thank E. Agol for constructive comments. Data availability. The data used in this paper are associated with JWST program ERS 1366 and are available from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (https://mast.stsci.edu). The data products required to generate Figs. 1, 2, 3, and Extended Data Figs. 1, 3 and 5 are available here: https://zenodo.org/record/7388032. All additional data are available upon request. Code availability. The codes used in this publication to extract, reduce, and analyse the data are as follows; STScI JWST Calibration pipeline (https://github.com/spacetelescope/jwst), FIREFLy, tshirt, Eureka! (https://eurekadocs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) and Tiberius. In addition, these made use of Exoplanet (https://docs.exoplanet.codes/en/latest/), Pymc3 (ref. 77) (https://docs.pymc.io/en/v3/index.html), ExoTEP, Batman, (http://lkreidberg.github.io/batman/docs/html/index.html), ExoTiC-ISM (https://github.com/Exo-TiC/ExoTiC-ISM), ExoTiC-LD (https://exotic-ld.readthedocs.io/en/latest/), Emcee (https://emcee.readthedocs.io/en/stable/), Dynesty (https://dynesty.readthedocs.io/en/stable/index.html) and chromatic (https://zkbt.github.io/chromatic/), which use the python libraries scipy, numpy, astropy and matplotlib. The atmospheric models used to fit the data can be found at PICASO (https://natashabatalha.github.io/picaso/), Virga85 (https://natashabatalha.github.io/virga/), ScCHIMERA (https://github.com/mrline/CHIMERA), ATMO and PHOENIX. Contributions. All authors played a significant role in one or more of the following: development of the original proposal, management of the project, definition of the target list and observation plan, analysis of the data, theoretical modelling and preparation of this paper. Some specific contributions are listed as follows. N.E.B., J.L.B., Z.K.B-T., I.J.M.C., J.D., L.K., M.R.L., D.K.S., and K.B.S. provided overall program leadership and management. 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 significant contributions to the design of the program. K.B.S. generated the observing plan with input from the team. 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 coled working groups and/or contributed to significant 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. Z.R., D.K.S., J.K., E.S., E.M.M. and A.L.C. reduced the data, modelled the light curves and produced the planetary spectrum. S.M., M.R.L., J.M.G. and J.L. generated theoretical model grids for comparison with the data. Z.R., D.K.S., C.P., E.M.M., E.S., J.K., M.L. and S.M. made significant contributions to the writing of this paper. Z.R., D.K.S., S.M., E.M.M. and M.R.L. generated figures for this paper. B.V.R., D.K.P., I.J.M.C., J.T., J.M.G., J.L.B., M.L.M., R.H., R.J.M., S.E.M. and T.D. contributed to the writing of this paper. The authors declare no competing interests.

Attached Files

Published - s41586-022-05677-y.pdf

Files

s41586-022-05677-y.pdf

Files (26.3 MB)

Name	Size	Download all
s41586-022-05677-y.pdf md5:055a9470a4a918e79f5890513d2ed697	26.3 MB	Preview Download

Additional details

	All versions	This version
Views	0	0
Downloads	0	0
Data volume	0 Bytes	0 Bytes