Dissemin is shutting down on January 1st, 2025

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Nature Research, Nature, 7949(614), p. 664-669, 2023

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05591-3

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

Journal article published in 2023 by Lili Alderson ORCID, Hannah R. Wakeford ORCID, Munazza K. Alam, Natasha E. Batalha, Joshua D. Lothringer ORCID, Jea Adams Redai, Jea Adams Redai, Saugata Barat, Jonathan Brande, Mario Damiano, Tansu Daylan, Néstor Espinoza, Laura Flagg, Jayesh M. Goyal, David Grant and other authors.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

AbstractMeasuring the abundances of carbon and oxygen in exoplanet atmospheres is considered a crucial avenue for unlocking the formation and evolution of exoplanetary systems1,2. Access to the chemical inventory of an exoplanet requires high-precision observations, often inferred from individual molecular detections with low-resolution space-based3–5 and high-resolution ground-based6–8 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. 9), 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 range10.