Retrieving Exoplanet Atmospheres using Planetary Infrared Excess: Prospects for the Nightside of WASP-43 b and other Hot Jupiters

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that the planetary infrared excess (PIE) technique, combined with JWST's broad wavelength coverage, can effectively characterize the nightside atmospheres of hot Jupiters like WASP-43b, even for non-transiting planets.

Contribution

The paper shows that PIE with JWST can disentangle stellar and planetary spectra, enabling atmospheric characterization of non-transiting exoplanets with improved accuracy over traditional methods.

Findings

PIE allows robust retrieval of nightside thermal structure and water abundance.

Combining NIRISS, NIRSpec, and MIRI spectra achieves near-traditional measurement precision.

PIE can resolve degeneracies in non-transiting planets, expanding atmospheric studies.

Abstract

To increase the sample size of future atmospheric characterization efforts, we build on the planetary infrared excess (PIE) technique that has been proposed as a means to detect and characterize the thermal spectra of transiting and non-transiting exoplanets using sufficiently broad wavelength coverage to uniquely constrain the stellar and planetary spectral components from spatially unresolved observations. We performed simultaneous retrievals of stellar and planetary spectra for the archetypal planet WASP-43b in its original configuration and a non-transiting configuration to determine the efficacy of the PIE technique for characterizing the planet's nightside atmospheric thermal structure and composition using typical out-of-transit JWST observations. We found that using PIE with JWST should enable the stellar and planetary spectra to be disentangled with no degeneracies seen between the two flux sources, thus allowing robust constraints on the planet's nightside thermal structure and water abundance to be retrieved. The broad wavelength coverage achieved by combining spectra from NIRISS, NIRSpec, and MIRI enables PIE retrievals that are within 10% of the precision attained using traditional secondary eclipse measurements, although mid-IR observations with MIRI alone may face up to 3.5 times lower precision on the planet's irradiation temperature. For non-transiting planets with unconstrained radius priors, we were able to identify and break the degeneracy between planet radius and irradiation temperature using data that resolved the peak of both the stellar and planetary spectra, thus potentially increasing the number of planets amenable to atmospheric characterization with JWST and other future mission concepts.