Day-night transport induced chemistry and clouds on WASP-39b I: Gas-phase composition

TL;DR

This study uses 2D photochemical and microphysical cloud models, combined with 3D GCM data, to analyze how day-night transport affects atmospheric composition and cloud coverage on exoplanet WASP-39b, highlighting the role of horizontal winds.

Contribution

It introduces a combined 2D photochemical and microphysical modeling approach applied to 3D GCM data to study atmospheric transport and composition on WASP-39b, emphasizing horizontal transport effects.

Findings

SO₂ produced on the dayside is transported to the nightside.

Horizontal transport reduces limb differences in methane and SO₂.

Fast zonal winds lead to minimal limb asymmetry in atmospheric composition.

Abstract

JWST has recently detected the first robust photochemical product on an exoplanet: sulfur dioxide (SO$_2$) on WASP-39b (Rustamkulov et al. 2023; Alderson et al. 2023; Tsai et al. 2023b). The data from the NIRISS instrument also reveal signs of partial coverage of clouds (Feinstein et al. 2023). Most of the previous studies have focused on interpreting spectral data with 1D models. To explore how the chemical species and cloud particles are altered by global circulation, we applied a 2D photochemical model and a 2D microphysical cloud model separately to post-process the thermal and dynamical structures simulated by a 3D general circulation model (GCM) of WASP-39b. We found that SO$_2$ produced by photochemistry on the dayside can be transported to the nightside owing to the efficient replenishment of horizontal transport. The morning-evening limb differences in methane (CH$_4$) abundances predicted by the 1D models disappeared after horizontal transport is included. Similarly, the inclusion of horizontal transport also reduced the limb differences in SO$_2$. Our modeling results suggest that the fast zonal wind results in minimal or negligible limb asymmetry in composition. Based on the synthetic spectra generated by our 2D atmosphere simulations, we propose that observing SO$_2$ absorption in the emission spectra of WASP-39b at different phases may offer opportunities to probe the horizontal quenching process of photochemical products. We will focus on the gas-phase chemistry in this paper and leave the results regarding clouds in the subsequent paper as part of the series.