Transit spectrophotometry of the exoplanet HD189733b. II. New Spitzer observations at 3.6 microns

TL;DR

This study improves the precision of the near-infrared radius measurement of exoplanet HD189733b at 3.6 microns using new Spitzer observations, addressing previous systematic issues and analyzing stellar activity effects.

Contribution

It provides more accurate transit parameters at 3.6 microns and introduces a method to correct for stellar activity using ground-based photometry.

Findings

Transit parameters are three times more precise than previous measurements.

Corrected radius ratio aligns with earlier measurements after accounting for stellar activity.

Water vapor detection remains inconclusive due to atmospheric absorption by other species.

Abstract

We present a new primary transit observation of the hot-jupiter HD189733b, obtained at 3.6 microns with the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) onboard the Spitzer Space Telescope. Previous measurements at 3.6 microns suffered from strong systematics and conclusions could hardly be obtained with confidence on the water detection by comparison of the 3.6 and 5.8 microns observations. We use a high S/N Spitzer photometric transit light curve to improve the precision of the near infrared radius of the planet at 3.6 microns. The observation has been performed using high-cadence time series integrated in the subarray mode. We are able to derive accurate system parameters, including planet-to-star radius ratio, impact parameter, scale of the system, and central time of the transit from the fits of the transit light curve. We compare the results with transmission spectroscopic models and with results from previous observations at the same wavelength. We obtained the following system parameters: R_p/R_\star=0.15566+0.00011-0.00024, b=0.661+0.0053-0.0050, and a/R_\star=8.925+0.0490-0.0523 at 3.6 microns. These measurements are three times more accurate than previous studies at this wavelength because they benefit from greater observational efficiency and less statistic and systematic errors. Nonetheless, we find that the radius ratio has to be corrected for stellar activity and present a method to do so using ground-based long-duration photometric follow-up in the V-band. The resulting planet-to-star radius ratio corrected for the stellar variability is in agreement with the previous measurement obtained in the same bandpass (Desert et al. 2009). We also discuss that water vapour could not be evidenced by comparison of the planetary radius measured at 3.6 and 5.8 microns, because the radius measured at 3.6 microns is affected by absorption by other species, possibly Rayleigh scattering by haze.