Toward Exoplanet Transit Spectroscopy Using JWST/MIRI's Medium Resolution Spectrometer

TL;DR

This study evaluates JWST/MIRI's Medium Resolution Spectrometer for exoplanet transit spectroscopy, demonstrating its capabilities and challenges through observations of a binary star system, and assessing its potential for atmospheric detection.

Contribution

The paper presents the first performance assessment of JWST/MIRI MRS for time series exoplanet spectroscopy, including data analysis techniques to mitigate detector charge migration and demonstrate near photon-limited performance.

Findings

Successfully mitigated charge migration effects in data analysis.

Achieved near photon-limited performance at wavelengths >5.2 microns.

Detected atomic hydrogen emission lines in the secondary star.

Abstract

The Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI)'s Medium Resolution Spectrometer (the MRS) on JWST has potentially important advantages for transit and eclipse spectroscopy of exoplanets, including lack of saturation for bright host stars, wavelength span to longward of 20 microns, and JWST's highest spectral resolving power. We here test the performance of the MRS for time series spectroscopy by observing the secondary eclipse of the bright stellar eclipsing binary R Canis Majoris. Our observations push the MRS into saturation at the shortest wavelength, more than for any currently known exoplanet system. We find strong charge migration between pixels that we mitigate using a custom data analysis pipeline. Our data analysis recovers much of the spatial charge migration by combining detector pixels at the group level, via weighting by the point spread function. We achieve nearly photon-limited performance in time series data at wavelengths longward of 5.2 microns. In 2017, Snellen et al. suggested that the MRS could be used to detect carbon dioxide absorption from the atmosphere of the temperate planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. We infer that the relative spectral response of the MRS versus wavelength is sufficiently stable to make that detection feasible. As regards the secondary eclipse of this Algol-type binary, we measure the eclipse depth by summing our spectra over the wavelengths in four channels, and also measuring the eclipse depth as observed by TESS. Those eclipse depths require a temperature for the secondary star that is significantly hotter than previous observations in the optical to near-IR, probably due to irradiation by the primary star. At full spectral resolution of the MRS, we find atomic hydrogen recombination emission lines in the secondary star, from principal quantum levels n = 7, 8, 10, and 14.