Exoplanet Spectroscopy with JWST NIRISS: Diagnostics and Case Studies

TL;DR

This paper evaluates JWST NIRISS SOSS instrument performance for exoplanet spectroscopy, focusing on data reduction, contamination correction, noise analysis, and providing insights for future atmospheric retrievals.

Contribution

It introduces a custom pipeline, JExoRes, and presents methods for contamination correction and noise characterization specific to NIRISS SOSS data.

Findings

Identification of significant correlated noise in spectra

Development of a contamination correction method for background sources

Empirical throughput function for NIRISS SOSS

Abstract

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is ushering in a new era in remote sensing of exoplanetary atmospheres. Atmospheric retrievals of exoplanets can be highly sensitive to high-precision JWST data. It is, therefore, imperative to characterise the instruments and noise sources using early observations to enable robust characterisation of exoplanetary atmospheres using JWST-quality spectra. The present work is a step in that direction, focusing on the NIRISS SOSS instrument mode, with a wavelength coverage of 0.6 - 2.8 {\mu}m and R ~ 700. Using a custom-built pipeline, JExoRes, we investigate key diagnostics of NIRISS SOSS with observations of two giant exoplanets, WASP-39 b and WASP-96 b, as case studies. We conduct a detailed evaluation of the different aspects of the data reduction and analysis, including sources of contamination, 1/f noise, and system properties such as limb darkening. The slitless nature of NIRISS SOSS makes it susceptible to contamination due to background sources. We present a method to model and correct for dispersed field stars which can significantly improve the accuracy of the observed spectra. In doing so, we also report an empirically determined throughput function for the instrument. We find significant correlated noise in the derived spectra, which may be attributed to 1/f noise, and discuss its implications for spectral binning. We quantify the covariance matrix which would enable the consideration of correlated noise in atmospheric retrievals. Finally, we conduct a comparative assessment of NIRISS SOSS spectra of WASP-39 b reported using different pipelines and highlight important lessons for exoplanet spectroscopy with JWST NIRISS.