Published in
American Astronomical Society, Astrophysical Journal Letters, 1(835), p. L12
DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/835/1/l12
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HST PanCET program: A Cloudy Atmosphere for the promising JWST target WASP-101b
,
Kb B. Stevenson ,
Nk K. Lewis ,
Dk K. Sing,
M. López-Morales ,
M. Marley,
T. Kataria ,
A. Mandell ,
Ge E. Ballester,
J. Barstow ,
L. Ben-Jaffel ,
V. Bourrier,
La A. Buchhave ,
D. Ehrenreich ,
T. M. Evans
and other authors.
Full text: Download
Abstract
We present results from the first observations of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Panchromatic Comparative Exoplanet Treasury (PanCET) program for WASP-101b, a highly inflated hot Jupiter and one of the community targets proposed for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Early Release Science (ERS) program. From a single HST Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) observation, we find that the near-infrared transmission spectrum of WASP-101b contains no significant H$_2$O absorption features and we rule out a clear atmosphere at 13{σ}. Therefore, WASP-101b is not an optimum target for a JWST ERS program aimed at observing strong molecular transmission features. We compare WASP-101b to the well studied and nearly identical hot Jupiter WASP-31b. These twin planets show similar temperature-pressure profiles and atmospheric features in the near-infrared. We suggest exoplanets in the same parameter space as WASP-101b and WASP-31b will also exhibit cloudy transmission spectral features. For future HST exoplanet studies, our analysis also suggests that a lower count limit needs to be exceeded per pixel on the detector in order to avoid unwanted instrumental systematics. ; Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, 1 table, Accepted to ApJL