Abstract
Close-in giant exoplanets with temperatures greater than 2,000 K (‘ultra-hot Jupiters’) have been the subject of extensive efforts to determine their atmospheric properties using thermal emission measurements from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and Spitzer Space Telescope1,2,3. However, previous studies have yielded inconsistent results because the small sizes of the spectral features and the limited information content of the data resulted in high sensitivity to the varying assumptions made in the treatment of instrument systematics and the atmospheric retrieval analysis3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12. Here we present a dayside thermal emission spectrum of the ultra-hot Jupiter WASP-18b obtained with the NIRISS13 instrument on the JWST. The data span 0.85 to 2.85 μm in wavelength at an average resolving power of 400 and exhibit minimal systematics. The spectrum shows three water emission features (at >6σ confidence) and evidence for optical opacity, possibly attributable to H−, TiO and VO (combined significance of 3.8σ). Models that fit the data require a thermal inversion, molecular dissociation as predicted by chemical equilibrium, a solar heavy-element abundance (‘metallicity’, M/H = 1.03+1.11-0.51 times solar) and a carbon-to-oxygen (C/O) ratio less than unity. The data also yield a dayside brightness temperature map, which shows a peak in temperature near the substellar point that decreases steeply and symmetrically with longitude towards the terminators.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 292–298 |
| Number of pages | 7 |
| Journal | Nature |
| Volume | 620 |
| Issue number | 7973 |
| Early online date | 31 May 2023 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 10 Aug 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Acknowledgments:This work is based on observations made with the NASA/ESA/CSA JWST. The data were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) 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. These observations are associated with program JWST-ERS-01366. Support for this program was provided by NASA through a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute. The results reported herein benefited during the design phase from collaborations and/or information exchange within NASA’s Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS) research coordination network sponsored by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. L.-P.C. acknowledges funding by the Technologies for Exo-Planetary Science (TEPS) Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) CREATE Trainee Program. M.M., R.J.M. and L.W. acknowledge support provided by NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship Program. A.D.F. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation through the Graduate Research Fellowship Program. I.W. acknowledges support provided by NASA through the NASA Postdoctoral Program. B.V.R. acknowledges support from the 51 Pegasi b Fellowship funded by the Heising-Simons Foundation.
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