CaltechAUTHORS
Published September 20, 2023 | Version Published
Journal Article Open

Detection of Carbon Monoxide in the Atmosphere of WASP-39b Applying Standard Cross-correlation Techniques to JWST NIRSpec G395H Data

Creators

  • 1. ROR icon Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias
  • 2. ROR icon University of La Laguna
  • 3. ROR icon Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
  • 4. ROR icon Imperial College London
  • 5. ROR icon Ames Research Center
  • 6. ROR icon Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • 7. ROR icon University of Chicago
  • 8. ROR icon University of Leicester
  • 9. ROR icon KU Leuven
  • 10. ROR icon Space Telescope Science Institute
  • 11. ROR icon University of Paris
  • 12. ROR icon University of Central Florida
  • 13. ROR icon Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
  • 14. ROR icon Jet Propulsion Lab
  • 15. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 16. ROR icon University of Rome Tor Vergata
  • 17. ROR icon Max Planck Institute for Astronomy
  • 18. INAF—Turin Astrophysical Observatory, Pino Torinese, Italy
  • 19. ROR icon Excellence Cluster Universe
  • 20. ROR icon Chalmers University of Technology
  • 21. ROR icon University of Maryland, College Park
  • 22. ROR icon Wesleyan University
  • 23. ROR icon Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
  • 24. ROR icon University of Bristol
  • 25. Carnegie Earth & Planets Laboratory, 5241 Broad Branch Road NW, Washington, DC 20015, USA
  • 26. ROR icon University of Montreal
  • 27. ROR icon New York University Abu Dhabi
  • 28. ROR icon Leiden University
  • 29. ROR icon Princeton University
  • 30. ROR icon University of Geneva
  • 31. ROR icon Cornell University

Abstract

Carbon monoxide was recently reported in the atmosphere of the hot Jupiter WASP-39b using the NIRSpec PRISM transit observation of this planet, collected as part of the JWST Transiting Exoplanet Community Early Release Science Program. This detection, however, could not be confidently confirmed in the initial analysis of the higher-resolution observations with NIRSpec G395H disperser. Here we confirm the detection of CO in the atmosphere of WASP-39b using the NIRSpec G395H data and cross-correlation techniques. We do this by searching for the CO signal in the unbinned transmission spectrum of the planet between 4.6 and 5.0 μm, where the contribution of CO is expected to be higher than that of other anticipated molecules in the planet's atmosphere. Our search results in a detection of CO with a cross-correlation function (CCF) significance of 6.6σ when using a template with only 12C16O lines. The CCF significance of the CO signal increases to 7.5σ when including in the template lines from additional CO isotopologues, with the largest contribution being from 13C16O. Our results highlight how cross-correlation techniques can be a powerful tool for unveiling the chemical composition of exoplanetary atmospheres from medium-resolution transmission spectra, including the detection of isotopologues.

Copyright and License

© 2023. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.

Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

Acknowledgement

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 JWST. The specific observations can be accessed via doi:10.17909/gdm2-0q65. These observations are associated with program JWST-ERS-01366. Support for program JWST-ERS-01366 was provided by NASA through a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute. This work was supported by grant JWST-ERS-01366.033-A. E.E-B and E.P. acknowledge funding from the Spanish Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness through project PGC2018-098153-B-C31. E.E-B acknowledges financial support from the European Union and the State Agency of Investigation of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN) under the grant PRE2020-093107 of the Pre-Doc Program for the Training of Doctors (FPI-SO) through FSE funds. J.K. acknowledges financial support from Imperial College London through an Imperial College Research Grant.

Facilities

JWST (NIRSpec) - James Webb Space Telescope.

Software References

batman (Kreidberg 2015), emcee (Foreman-Mackey et al. 2013), ExoTIC-LD (Grant & Wakeford 2022), george (Ambikasaran et al. 2015), petitRADTRANS (Mollière et al. 2019), PyAstronomy (Czesla et al. 2019, https://github.com/sczesla/PyAstronomy), spectres (Carnall 2017), scipy (Virtanen et al. 2020), Tiberius (Kirk et al. 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021).

Files

Esparza-Borges_2023_ApJL_955_L19.pdf

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Additional details

Related works

Featured in
Newsletter: https://aasnova.org/2023/12/15/jwst-the-worlds-most-sophisticated-carbon-monoxide-detector/ (URL)
Is new version of
Discussion Paper: arXiv:2309.00036 (arXiv)
Is supplemented by
Dataset: 10.17909/gdm2-0q65 (DOI)

Funding

National Aeronautics and Space Administration
NAS 5-03127
Space Telescope Science Institute
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
JWST-ERS-01366.033-A
Spanish Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness
PGC2018-14098153-B-C31
European Union
Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades
PRE2020-093107
Imperial College London

Dates

Accepted
2023-08-14
Available
2023-09-21
Published

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences (GPS)
Publication Status
Published