Confirmation of Water Absorption in the Thermal Emission Spectrum of the Hot Jupiter WASP-77Ab with HST/WFC3

TL;DR

This study confirms water absorption in the atmosphere of hot Jupiter WASP-77Ab using HST/WFC3 data, revealing a non-inverted thermal structure and highlighting challenges in constraining disequilibrium chemistry with low-resolution spectra.

Contribution

First detection of water absorption in WASP-77Ab's spectrum with HST/WFC3, and comparison of retrieval models revealing complexities in atmospheric composition analysis.

Findings

Water absorption indicates a non-inverted thermal structure.

Atmospheric water abundance constrained to .78 in log scale.

Discrepancies between low- and high-resolution data suggest disequilibrium chemistry effects.

Abstract

Secondary eclipse observations of hot Jupiters can reveal both their compositions and thermal structures. Previous observations have shown a diversity of hot Jupiter eclipse spectra, including absorption features, emission features, and featureless blackbody-like spectra. We present a secondary eclipse spectrum of the hot Jupiter WASP-77Ab observed between $1-5$ $\mu$m with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the Spitzer Space Telescope. The HST observations show signs of water absorption indicative of a non-inverted thermal structure. We fit the data with both a one-dimensional free retrieval and a grid of one-dimensional self-consistent forward models to confirm this non-inverted structure. The free retrieval places a $3\sigma$ lower limit on the atmospheric water abundance of $\log(n_\mathrm{H_2O})>-4.78$ and can not constrain the CO abundance. The grid fit produces a slightly super-stellar metallicity and constrains the carbon-to-oxygen ratio to less than or equal to the solar value. We also compare our data to recent high-resolution observations of WASP-77Ab taken with the Gemini-South/IGRINS spectrograph and find that our observations are consistent with the best-fit model to the high-resolution data. However, the metallicity derived from the IGRINS data is significantly lower than that derived from our self-consistent model fit. We find that this difference may be due to disequilibrium chemistry, and the varying results between the models applied here demonstrate the difficulty of constraining disequilibrium chemistry with low-resolution, low wavelength coverage data alone. Future work to combine observations from IGRINS, HST, and JWST will improve our estimate of the atmospheric composition of WASP-77Ab.