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

Feinstein, Adina D; Radica, Michael; Welbanks, Luis; Murray, Catriona Anne; Ohno, Kazumasa; Coulombe, Louis-Philippe; Espinoza, Néstor; Bean, Jacob L; Teske, Johanna K; Benneke, Björn; Line, Michael R; Rustamkulov, Zafar; Saba, Arianna; Tsiaras, Angelos; Barstow, Joanna K.; Fortney, Jonathan J; Gao, Peter; Knutson, Heather A; MacDonald, Ryan J; Mikal-Evans, Thomas; Rackham, Benjamin V; Taylor, Jake; Parmentier, Vivien; Batalha, Natalie M; Berta-Thompson, Zachory K; Carter, Aarynn L; Changeat, Quentin; Dos Santos, Leonardo A; Gibson, Neale P; Goyal, Jayesh M; Kreidberg, Laura; López-Morales, Mercedes; Lothringer, Joshua D; Miguel, Yamila; Molaverdikhani, Karan; Moran, Sarah E; Morello, Giuseppe; Mukherjee, Sagnick; Sing, David K; Stevenson, Kevin B; Wakeford, Hannah R; Ahrer, Eva-Maria; Alam, Munazza K; Alderson, Lili; Allen, Natalie H; Batalha, Natasha E; Bell, Taylor J; Blecic, Jasmina; Brande, Jonathan; Caceres, Claudio; Casewell, S L; Chubb, Katy L; Crossfield, Ian J M; Crouzet, Nicolas; Cubillos, Patricio E; Decin, Leen; Désert, Jean-Michel; Harrington, Joseph; Heng, Kevin; Henning, Thomas; Iro, Nicolas; Kempton, Eliza M-R; Kendrew, Sarah; Kirk, James; Krick, Jessica; Lagage, Pierre-Olivier; Lendl, Monika; Mancini, Luigi; Mansfield, Megan; May, E M; Mayne, N J; Nikolov, Nikolay K; Palle, Enric; de la Roche, Dominique J M Petit Dit; Piaulet, Caroline; Powell, Diana; Redfield, Seth; Rogers, Laura K; Roman, Michael T; Roy, Pierre-Alexis; Nixon, Matthew C; Schlawin, Everett; Tan, Xianyu; Tremblin, P; Turner, Jake D; Venot, Olivia; Waalkes, William C; Wheatley, Peter J and Zhang, Xi (2023). Early Release Science of the exoplanet WASP-39b with JWST NIRISS. Nature, 614(7949) pp. 670–675.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05674-1

Abstract

The Saturn-mass exoplanet WASP-39b has been the subject of extensive efforts to determine its atmospheric properties using transmission spectroscopy1-4. However, these efforts have been hampered by modelling degeneracies between composition and cloud properties that are caused by limited data quality5-9. Here, we present the transmission spectrum of WASP-39 b obtained using the SOSS mode of the NIRISS instrument on JWST. This spectrum spans 0.6-2.8𝝻m in wavelength and reveals multiple 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 ~10-30x 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-gray clouds with inhomogeneous coverage of the planet's terminator.

Viewing alternatives

Look up in Google Scholar

Download history

Metrics

Public Attention

Altmetrics from Altmetric

Number of Citations

Citations from Dimensions

Item Actions

Export

About

CORE (COnnecting REpositories)

Recommendations