Early Release Science of the exoplanet WASP-39b with JWST NIRSpec G395H

Alderson, Lili; Wakeford, Hannah R.; Alam, Munazza K.; Batalha, Natasha E.; Lothringer, Joshua D.; Adams Redai, Jéa I.; Barat, Saugata; Brande, Jonathan; Damiano, Mario; Daylan, Tansu; Espinoza, Néstor; Flagg, Laura; Goyal, Jayesh M.; Grant, David M.; Hu, Renyu; Inglis, Julie; Lee, Elspeth K. H.; Mikal-Evans, Thomas; Ramos-Rosado, Lakeisha; Roy, Pierre-Alexis; Wallack, Nicole L.; Batalha, Natalie M.; Bean, Jacob L.; Benneke, Björn; Berta-Thompson, Zachory K.; Carter, Aarynn L.; Changeat, Quentin; Colón, Knicole D.; Crossfield, Ian J. M.; Désert, Jean-Michel; Foreman-Mackey, Daniel; Gibson, Neale P.; Kreidberg, Laura; Line, Michael R.; López-Morales, Mercedes; Molaverdikhani, Karan; Moran, Sarah E.; Morello, Giuseppe; Moses, Julianne I.; Mukherjee, Sagnick; Schlawin, Everett; Sing, David K.; Stevenson, Kevin B.; Taylor, Jake; Aggarwal, Keshav; Ahrer, Eva-Maria; Allen, Natalie H.; Barstow, Joanna K.; Bell, Taylor J.; Blecic, Jasmina; Casewell, Sarah L.; Chubb, Katy L.; Crouzet, Nicolas; Cubillos, Patricio E.; Decin, Leen; Feinstein, Adina D.; Fortney, Jonathan J.; Harrington, Joseph; Heng, Kevin; Iro, Nicolas; Kempton, Eliza M.-R.; Kirk, James; Knutson, Heather A.; Krick, Jessica E.; Leconte, Jérémy; Lendl, Monika; MacDonald, Ryan J.; Mancini, Luigi; Mansfield, Megan; May, Erin M.; Mayne, Nathan J.; Miguel, Yamila; Nikolov, Nikolay K.; Ohno, Kazumasa; Palle, Enric; Parmentier, Vivien; Petit dit de la Roche, Dominique J. M.; Piaulet, Caroline; Powell, Diana; Rackham, Benjamin V.; Redfield, Seth; Rogers, Laura K.; Rustamkulov, Zafar; Tan, Xianyu; Tremblin, P.; Tsai, Shang-Min; Turner, Jake D.; de Val-Borro, Miguel; Venot, Olivia; Welbanks, Luis; Wheatley, Peter J.; Zhang, Xi

doi:10.1038/s41586-022-05591-3

Published February 23, 2023 | Version Published + Supplemental Material

Journal Article Open

Early Release Science of the exoplanet WASP-39b with JWST NIRSpec G395H

1. University of Bristol
2. Carnegie Institution for Science
3. Ames Research Center
4. Utah Valley University
5. Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
6. University of Amsterdam
7. University of Kansas
8. Jet Propulsion Lab
9. Princeton University
10. Space Telescope Science Institute
11. Johns Hopkins University
12. Cornell University
13. National Institute of Science Education and Research
14. California Institute of Technology
15. University of Bern
16. Max Planck Institute for Astronomy
17. University of Montreal
18. University of California, Santa Cruz
19. University of Chicago
20. University of Colorado Boulder
21. University College London
22. Goddard Space Flight Center
23. Trinity College Dublin
24. Arizona State University
25. Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
26. Excellence Cluster Origins
27. University of Arizona
28. Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias
29. University of La Laguna
30. Osservatorio Astronomico di Palermo
31. Space Science Institute
32. Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
33. University of Oxford
34. Indian Institute of Technology Indore
35. University of Warwick
36. The Open University
37. Bay Area Environmental Research Institute
38. New York University Abu Dhabi
39. University of Leicester
40. University of St Andrews
41. Leiden University
42. Osservatorio Astrofisico di Torino
43. Space Research Institute
44. KU Leuven
45. University of Central Florida
46. University of Vienna
47. University of Maryland, College Park
48. Imperial College London
49. Laboratory of Astrophysics of Bordeaux
50. University of Geneva
51. University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
52. University of Rome Tor Vergata
53. University of Exeter
54. Netherlands Institute for Space Research
55. Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur
56. Lagrange Laboratory
57. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
58. Wesleyan University
59. University of Cambridge
60. Maison de la Simulation
61. Planetary Science Institute
62. French National Centre for Scientific Research

Measuring the abundances of carbon and oxygen in exoplanet atmospheres is considered a crucial avenue for unlocking the formation and evolution of exoplanetary systems. Access to the chemical inventory of an exoplanet requires high-precision observations, often inferred from individual molecular detections with low-resolution space-based and high-resolution ground-based facilities. Here we report the medium-resolution (R ≈ 600) transmission spectrum of an exoplanet atmosphere between 3 and 5 μm covering several absorption features for the Saturn-mass exoplanet WASP-39b (ref.), obtained with the Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) G395H grating of JWST. Our observations achieve 1.46 times photon precision, providing an average transit depth uncertainty of 221 ppm per spectroscopic bin, and present minimal impacts from systematic effects. We detect significant absorption from CO2 (28.5σ) and H2O (21.5σ), and identify SO2 as the source of absorption at 4.1 μm (4.8σ). Best-fit atmospheric models range between 3 and 10 times solar metallicity, with sub-solar to solar C/O ratios. These results, including the detection of SO2, underscore the importance of characterizing the chemistry in exoplanet atmospheres and showcase NIRSpec G395H as an excellent mode for time-series observations over this critical wavelength range.

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© The Author(s) 2023. 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 NAS 5-03127 for the JWST. These observations are associated with programme JWST-ERS-01366. Support for programme 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 NAS 5-03127. L.A. acknowledges funding from STFC grant ST/W507337/1 and from the University of Bristol School of Physics PhD Scholarship Fund. Contributions. All authors played a substantial 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 manuscript. Some specific contributions are listed as follows. N.M.B., J.L.B. and K.B.S. provided overall programme leadership and management. L.A. and H.R.W. led the efforts for this manuscript. 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 notable contributions to the design of the programme. K.B.S. generated the observing plan, with input from the team. E.S. and N.E. provided instrument expertise. 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 co-led working groups and/or contributed to important 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. L.A., H.R.W., M.K.A., N.E.B. and J.D.L. contributed substantially to the writing of this manuscript, along with contributions in Methods from J.A.R., S.B., M.D., N.E., L.F., J.M.G., D.G., J.I., T.M.-E., P.-A.R. and N.L.W. L.A., H.R.W., M.K.A., J.A.R., S.B., M.D., N.E., L.F., D.G., J.I., T.M.-E., P.-A.R. and N.L.W. contributed to the development of data-analysis pipelines and/or provided the data-analysis products used in this analysis, that is, reduced the data, modelled the light curves and/or produced the planetary spectrum, with further contributions from J.Brande, T.D. and L.R.-R. J.D.L., N.E.B., J.M.G., E.K.H.L. and R.H. generated theoretical model grids for comparison with data. H.R.W., J.D.L. and N.E.B. generated figures for this manuscript. M.L.-M., K.D.C., N.P.G., L.K., M.L., J.I.M. and E.S. provided substantial feedback to the manuscript, coordinating comments from all other authors. T.D. is a LSSTC Catalyst Fellow, N.H.A. and A.D.F. are NSF Graduate Research Fellows, J.Kirk is an Imperial College Research Fellow, R.J.M., M.M., D.P., J.D.T. and L.W. are NHFP Sagan Fellows and B.V.R. is a 51 Pegasi b Fellow. Data availability. The data used in this paper are associated with JWST programme ERS 1366 (observation #4) and are available from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST; https://mast.stsci.edu). Science data processing version (SDP_VER) 2022_2a generated the uncalibrated data that we downloaded from MAST. We used JWST Calibration Pipeline software version (CAL_VER) 1.5.3 with modifications described in the text. We used calibration reference data from context (CRDS_CTX) 0916, except as noted in the text. All the data and models presented in this publication can be found at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7185300. Code availability. The codes used in this publication to extract, reduce and analyse the data are as follows; STScI JWST Calibration Pipeline44 (https://github.com/spacetelescope/jwst), Eureka!50 (https://eurekadocs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/), ExoTiC-JEDI45 (https://github.com/Exo-TiC/ExoTiC-JEDI), juliet68 (https://juliet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/), Tiberius15,46,47, transitspectroscopy48 (https://github.com/nespinoza/transitspectroscopy). Furthermore, these made use of batman62 (http://lkreidberg.github.io/batman/docs/html/index.html), celerite83 (https://celerite.readthedocs.io/en/stable/), chromatic (https://zkbt.github.io/chromatic/), dynesty69 (https://dynesty.readthedocs.io/en/stable/index.html), emcee66 (https://emcee.readthedocs.io/en/stable/), exoplanet80 (https://docs.exoplanet.codes/en/latest/), ExoTEP72,73,74, ExoTHETyS76 (https://github.com/ucl-exoplanets/ExoTETHyS), ExoTiC-ISM54 (https://github.com/Exo-TiC/ExoTiC-ISM), ExoTiC-LD55 (https://exotic-ld.readthedocs.io/en/latest/), george65 (https://george.readthedocs.io/en/latest/), JAX79 (https://jax.readthedocs.io/en/latest/), LMFIT67 (https://lmfit.github.io/lmfit-py/), PyLightcurve75 (https://github.com/ucl-exoplanets/pylightcurve), PyMC3 (ref. 132) (https://docs.pymc.io/en/v3/index.html) and Starry81 (https://starry.readthedocs.io/en/latest/), each of which use the standard Python libraries astropy133,134, matplotlib135, numpy136, pandas137, scipy61 and xarray138. The atmospheric models used to fit the data can be found at ATMO85,86,87,88, PHOENIX89,90,91, PICASO95,96 (https://natashabatalha.github.io/picaso/), Virga95,104 (https://natashabatalha.github.io/virga/) and gCMCRT109 (https://github.com/ELeeAstro/gCMCRT). The authors declare no competing interests.

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Additional details

Eprint ID: 122499
Resolver ID: CaltechAUTHORS:20230725-857476000.75

NASA
NAS 5-03127
NASA
JWST-ERS-01366
Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)
ST/W507337/1
University of Bristol

Created: 2023-08-18

Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated: 2023-08-18

Created from EPrint's last_modified field

Caltech groups: Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences (GPS) , Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)

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Early Release Science of the exoplanet WASP-39b with JWST NIRSpec G395H

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Early Release Science of the exoplanet WASP-39b with JWST NIRSpec G395H

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