The White Dwarf Opportunity - Supplementary material

Supplementary material for 'The White Dwarf Opportunity: Robust Detections of Molecules in Earth-like Exoplanet Atmospheres with the James Webb Space Telescope' - ApJL (2020).

This repository contains three figures, and full posterior probability distributions, corresponding to the modelling and retrieval analysis from Kaltenegger & MacDonald et al. (2020). The supplementary materials are as follows:

• WD_host_spectrum - comparison between the Sun's spectrum and the 5000 K white dwarf spectrum used in our atmospheric models.
• Mixing_ratio_profiles - calculated atmospheric mixing ratio profiles of H₂O, CH₄, O₃, CO₂, N₂O, CO, and CH₃Cl for an Earth-like planet in the white dwarf habitable zone.
• PT_profile - calculated pressure-temperature (P-T) profile for an Earth-like planet in the white dwarf habitable zone.
• Posterior_N_trans_... - full posterior distributions from the atmospheric retrievals corresponding to 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 25, 50, and 100 transits with JWST's NIRSpec Prism.  Each corner plot depicts correlations between pairs of retrieved parameters and marginalised histograms for each parameter. Where parameters have clear upper and lower bounds, the median retrieved values and ±1σ confidence levels are given. Otherwise, parameter constraints are expressed as 2σ upper or lower bounds.

For any questions, please contact: rmacdonald@astro.cornell.edu