Ground-based detections of thermal emission from CoRoT-1b and WASP-12b

TL;DR

This paper reports ground-based detections of thermal emission from exoplanets CoRoT-1b and WASP-12b, confirming their atmospheric properties and demonstrating the viability of ground-based methods for hot Jupiter characterization.

Contribution

It provides new ground-based measurements of thermal emission from CoRoT-1b and WASP-12b, confirming previous results and validating observational techniques for exoplanet atmosphere studies.

Findings

CoRoT-1b has an isothermal dayside with thermal inversion.

WASP-12b's eclipse depths are confirmed and consistent with prior measurements.

Ground-based observations are effective for hot Jupiter atmospheric characterization.

Abstract

We report a new detection of the H-band thermal emission of CoRoT-1b and two confirmation detections of the Ks-band thermal emission of WASP-12b at secondary eclipses. The H-band measurement of CoRoT-1b shows an eclipse depth of 0.145%\pm0.049% with a 3-{\sigma} percentile between 0.033% - 0.235%. This depth is consistent with the previous conclusions that the planet has an isother- mal region with inefficient heat transport from dayside to nightside, and has a dayside thermal inversion layer at high altitude. The two Ks band detections of WASP-12b show a joint eclipse depth of 0.299%\pm0.065%. This result agrees with the measurement of Croll & collaborators, providing independent confirmation of their measurement. The repeatability of the WASP-12b measurements also validates our data analysis method. Our measurements, in addition to a number of previous results made with other telescopes, demonstrate that ground-based observations are becoming widely available for characterization of atmospheres of hot Jupiters.