Published May 8, 2024 | Accepted
Journal Article Open

A secondary atmosphere on the rocky Exoplanet 55 Cancri e

Abstract

Characterizing rocky exoplanets is a central endeavor of astronomy, and yet the search for atmospheres on rocky exoplanets has hitherto resulted in either tight upper limits on the atmospheric mass1–3 or inconclusive results4–6. The 1.95-REarth and 8.8-MEarth planet 55 Cnc e, with a predominantly rocky composition and an equilibrium temperature of ~2000 K, may have a volatile envelope (containing molecules made from a combination of C, H, O, N, S, and P elements) that accounts for up to a few percent of its radius7–13. The planet has been observed extensively with transmission spectroscopy14–22, and its thermal emission has been measured in broad photometric bands23–26. These observations disfavor a primordial H2/He-dominated atmosphere but cannot conclusively determine whether the planet has a secondary atmosphere27,28. Here we report a thermal emission spectrum of the planet obtained by JWST’s NIRCam and MIRI instruments from 4 to 12 μm. The measurements rule out the scenario where the planet is a lava world shrouded by a tenuous atmosphere made of vaporized rock29–32, and indicate a bona fide volatile atmosphere likely rich in CO2 or CO. This atmosphere can be outgassed from and sustained by a magma ocean.

Acknowledgement

We thank Fabrice Gaillard for helpful discussion on magma ocean outgassing and Julie Inglis for a helpful discussion regarding data reduction with JWST. This research is based on observations with the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) 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, Incorporated, under NASA contract NAS 5-03127. These observations are associated with program no. JWST-GO-1952. Support for program no. JWST-GO-1952 was provided through a grant from the STScI under NASA contract NAS 5-03127. Part of this research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004). Part of the high-performance computing resources used in this investigation were provided by funding from the JPL Information and Technology Solutions Directorate. M.Z. acknowledges support from the 51 Pegasi b Fellowship financed by the Heising-Simons Foundation. Y.M. and M.Z. have received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 101088557, N-GINE). Y.M. and C.B. acknowledge support of a Dutch Science Foundation (NWO) Planetary and Exoplanetary Science (PEPSci) grant. B.-O. D. acknowledges support from the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) under contract number MB22.00046.

Contributions

R.H. designed the observations, led the interpretation, and simulated the magma ocean - atmosphere models. A.B.-A. led the data analysis using Eureka!. M.Z. led the data analysis using SPARTA. K.P. and H.A.K. provided spectral retrievals. M.Z., C.B., and Y.M. provided self-consistent models for vaporized-rock and volatile atmospheres. M.B., Y.P., D.D., A.B., B.-O.D. provided independent data analyses. M.D. contributed to the design of the observations and the data analysis. Y.I. provided independent models of vaporized-rock atmospheres. M.S. developed the climate routine used for the magma ocean - atmosphere models. All authors contributed to the writing of the manuscript.

Data Availability

The data used in this paper are associated with JWST guest observer program 1952 and are available from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (https://mast.stsci.edu). The data products required to generate Figs. 1-3 and Extended Data Figs. 1-9, as well as the stellar spectrum and the data reduction configuration files for the Eureka! - Reduction 1 and SPARTA analyses are available here: https://osf.io/2s6md/ with DOI:10.17605/OSF.IO/2S6MD. All additional data are available upon request

Code Availability

The codes used in this publication to extract, reduce and analyze the data are as follows: STScI JWST calibration pipeline (https://github.com/spacetelescope/jwst), Eureka! (https://eurekadocs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/), STARK (https://github.com/Jayshil/stark), SPARTA (https://github.com/ideasrule/sparta), batman (http://lkreidberg.github.io/batman/docs/html/index.html), emcee (https://emcee.readthedocs.io/en/stable/), dynesty (https://dynesty.readthedocs.io/en/stable/index.html), and juliet (https://juliet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/). In addition, we have made use of HELIOS (https://github.com/exoclime/HELIOS), FastChem (https://github.com/exoclime/FastChem), PLATON (https://github.com/ideasrule/platon), petitRADTRANS (http://gitlab.com/mauricemolli/petitRADTRANS), and LavAtmos (https://github.com/cvbuchem/LavAtmos) to produce models.

Ethics

All authors have committed to upholding the principles of research ethics & inclusion as advocated by the Nature Portfolio journals.

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Additional details

Created:
May 16, 2024
Modified:
May 16, 2024