The JWST Transiting Exoplanet Community Early Release Science Program
Published November 22, 2022 | Version v1
Dataset Open

Products and Models for "Early Release Science of the Exoplanet WASP-39b with JWST NIRSpec G395H"

Creators

  • 1. School of Physics, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
  • 2. Earth and Planets Laboratory, Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington, DC, USA
  • 3. NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, USA
  • 4. Department of Physics, Utah Valley University, Orem, UT, USA
  • 5. Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, Cambridge, MA, USA
  • 6. Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  • 7. Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA
  • 8. Astrophysics Section, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA
  • 9. Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
  • 10. Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD, USA
  • 11. Department of Astronomy and Carl Sagan Institute, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
  • 12. School of Earth and Planetary Sciences (SEPS), National Institute of Science Education and Research (NISER), HBNI, Odisha, India
  • 13. Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA
  • 14. Center for Space and Habitability, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
  • 15. Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany
  • 16. Department of Physics & Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
  • 17. Department of Physics and Institute for Research on Exoplanets, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada

Description

Associated Publication: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05591-3

Overview:
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 an exoplanet’s chemical inventory 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 3–5 𝛍m covering multiple absorption features for the Saturn-mass exoplanet WASP-39b, obtained with JWST NIRSpec G395H. Our observations achieve 1.46x 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 (28.5\(\sigma\)) and H2O (21.5\(\sigma\)), and identify SO2 as the source of absorption at 4.1 𝛍m (4.8\(\sigma\)). Best-fit atmospheric models range between 3 and 10x solar metallicity, with sub-solar to solar C/O ratios. These results, including the detection of SO2, underscore the importance of characterising the chemistry in exoplanet atmospheres, and showcase NIRSpec G395H as an excellent mode for time series observations over this critical wavelength range.

 

 

Notes

See associated paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.10488

Files

G395H_paper_data.zip

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Additional details

Funding

STFC Bristol Physics 2021 DTP ST/W507337/1
UK Research and Innovation