Near-infrared Thermal Emission Detections of a number of hot Jupiters and the Systematics of Ground-based Near-infrared Photometry

TL;DR

This paper reports near-infrared thermal emission detections of hot Jupiters and a brown dwarf using CFHT/WIRCam, introduces a new data reduction pipeline, and discusses systematic error constraints in ground-based photometry.

Contribution

It presents a new high-precision photometry pipeline and novel techniques for constraining systematics in ground-based near-infrared observations of exoplanets.

Findings

Successful detection of thermal emission from multiple hot Jupiters and a brown dwarf.

Demonstrated repeatability of eclipse depth measurements in Ks-band.

Placed limits on systematics and atmospheric variability in hot Jupiters.

Abstract

We present detections of the near-infrared thermal emission of three hot Jupiters and one brown-dwarf using the Wide-field Infrared Camera (WIRCam) on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT). These include Ks-band secondary eclipse detections of the hot Jupiters WASP-3b and Qatar-1b and the brown dwarf KELT-1b. We also report Y-band, $K_{CONT}$-band, and two new and one reanalyzed Ks-band detections of the thermal emission of the hot Jupiter WASP-12b. We present a new reduction pipeline for CFHT/WIRCam data, which is optimized for high precision photometry. We also describe novel techniques for constraining systematic errors in ground-based near-infrared photometry, so as to return reliable secondary eclipse depths and uncertainties. We discuss the noise properties of our ground-based photometry for wavelengths spanning the near-infrared (the YJHK-bands), for faint and bright-stars, and for the same object on several occasions. For the hot Jupiters WASP-3b and WASP-12b we demonstrate the repeatability of our eclipse depth measurements in the Ks-band; we therefore place stringent limits on the systematics of ground-based, near-infrared photometry, and also rule out violent weather changes in the deep, high pressure atmospheres of these two hot Jupiters at the epochs of our observations.