Dr Jake Taylor (he/him)

Abstract:

The prevalence of atmospheres on rocky planets is one of the major questions in exoplanet astronomy, but there are currently no published unambiguous detections of atmospheres on any rocky exoplanets. The MIRI instrument on JWST can measure thermal emission from tidally locked rocky exoplanets orbiting small, cool stars. This emission is a function of their surface and atmospheric properties, potentially allowing detections of atmospheres. One way to find atmospheres is to search for lower dayside emission than would be expected for a blackbody planet. Another technique is to measure phase curves of thermal emission to search for nightside emission due to atmospheric heat redistribution. Here, we compare strategies for detecting atmospheres on rocky exoplanets. We simulate secondary eclipse and phase curve observations in the MIRI F1500W and F1280W filters for a range of surfaces (providing our open-access albedo data) and atmospheres on 30 exoplanets selected for their F1500W signal-to-noise ratio. We show that secondary eclipse observations are more degenerate between surfaces and atmospheres than suggested in previous work, and that thick atmospheres can support emission consistent with a blackbody planet in these filters. These results make it difficult to unambiguously detect or rule out atmospheres using their photometric dayside emission alone. We suggest that an F1500W phase curve could instead be observed for a similar sample of planets. While phase curves are time-consuming and their instrumental systematics can be challenging, we suggest that they allow the only unambiguous detections of atmospheres by nightside thermal emission.

Abstract:

A primary objective of exoplanet atmosphere characterization is to learn about planet formation and evolution, however, this is challenged by degeneracies. To determine whether differences in atmospheric composition can be reliably traced to differences in evolution, we are undertaking a transmission spectroscopy survey with JWST to compare the compositions of a sample of hot Jupiters that have different orbital alignments around F stars above the Kraft break. Under the assumption that aligned planets migrate through the inner disc, while misaligned planets migrate after disc dispersal, the act of migrating through the inner disc should cause a measurable difference in the C/O between aligned and misaligned planets. We expect the amplitude and sign of this difference to depend on the amount of planetesimal accretion and whether silicates accreted from the inner disc release their oxygen. Here, we identify all known exoplanets that are suitable for testing this hypothesis, describe our JWST survey, and use noise simulations and atmospheric retrievals to estimate our survey’s sensitivity. With the selected sample of four aligned and four misaligned hot Jupiters, we will be sensitive to the predicted differences in C/O between aligned and misaligned hot Jupiters for a wide range of model scenarios.

Abstract:

The Hubble Space Telescope has been a pioneering instrument for studying the atmospheres of exoplanets, specifically its WFC3 and STIS instruments. With the launch of JWST, we are able to observe larger spectral ranges at higher precision. NIRISS/SOSS covers the range 0.6–2.8 microns, and thus, it can serve as a direct comparison to WFC3 (0.8–1.7 microns). We perform atmospheric retrievals of WFC3 and NIRISS transmission spectra of WASP-39 b in order to compare their constraining power. We find that NIRISS is able to retrieve precise H₂O abundances that do not suffer a degeneracy with the continuum level due to the coverage of multiple spectral features. We also combine these data sets with spectra from STIS and find that challenges associated with fitting the steep optical slope can bias the retrieval results. In an effort to diagnose the differences between the WFC3 and NIRISS retrievals, we perform the analysis again on the NIRISS data cut to the same wavelength range as WFC3. We find that the water abundance is in strong disagreement with both the WFC3 and full NIRISS retrievals, highlighting the importance of wide wavelength coverage. Finally, we carry out mock retrievals on the different instruments, which shows further evidence of the challenges in constraining water abundance from the WFC3 data alone. Our study demonstrates the vast information gain of JWST’s NIRISS instrument over WFC3, highlighting the insights to be obtained from our new era of space-based instruments.