Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Wakeford, H. R.
• Stevenson, K. B.
• Lewis, N. K.
• Sing, D. K.
• López-Morales, M.
• Marley, M.
• Kataria, T.
• Mandell, A.
• Ballester, G. E.
• Barstow, J.
• Ben-Jaffel, L.
• Bourrier, V.
• Buchhave, L. A.
• Ehrenreich, D.
• Evans, T.
• García Muñoz, A.
• Henry, G.
• Knutson, H.
• Lavvas, P.
• Lecavelier des Etangs, A.
• Nikolov, N.
• Sanz-Forcada, J.

Titel

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

Ist Teil von

• Astrophysical journal. Letters, 2017-01, Vol.835 (1), p.L12-L12

Ort / Verlag

United States: The American Astronomical Society

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Quelle

Electronic Journals Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• 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 13 . 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.