A Detailed Investigation of HD 209458 b HST & JWST Transmission Spectra with SANSAR

TL;DR

This study uses SANSAR to analyze HD 209458 b's transmission spectra from HST and JWST, revealing that combined observations are essential for accurate atmospheric composition constraints, especially for metallicity and C/O ratios.

Contribution

The paper introduces SANSAR, a new atmospheric modeling framework, and demonstrates its effectiveness in resolving discrepancies in atmospheric parameters derived from different datasets.

Findings

NIRCam alone can overestimate atmospheric abundances.

Combined UV/Optical and near-infrared data provide more robust constraints.

Different retrieval methods yield consistent metallicity constraints when using combined data.

Abstract

HD 209458 b is the first exoplanet on which an atmosphere was detected. Since then, its atmosphere has been investigated using multiple telescopes and instruments. However, many of its atmospheric constraints remain debatable. While HST observations suggested a highly sub-solar metallicity, recent JWST NIRCam observations by Xue et al. 2024 constrained a super-solar metallicity with highly sub-solar C/O. In this work, we show a detailed investigation of HD 209458 b transmission spectra observations from JWST and HST using SANSAR, a newly developed planetary atmosphere modeling framework, with free, equilibrium chemistry and self-consistent grid retrievals. The overall best-fitting model with free retrievals ($\chi^2_{\rm{red}}$=1.21) constrains its metallicity and C/O to be highly sub-solar, while equilibrium chemistry and grid retrievals ($\chi^2_{\rm{red}}$=1.27 and 1.30, respectively) are consistent with solar values using STIS+WFC3+NIRCam observations. The retrieved abundances of H$_2$O and CO$_2$ are almost three orders of magnitude lower (highly sub-solar) with STIS+WFC3+NIRCam compared to just NIRCam, using free retrievals. NIRCam observations alone also result in misleading constraints on metallicity and C/O, with equilibrium chemistry and grid retrieval. We find that the model choice of varying C/H or O/H to vary the C/O in equilibrium chemistry retrievals leads to different metallicity constraints with NIRCam, but similar constraints with STIS+WFC3+NIRCam. We conclude that NIRCam observations alone can lead to overestimation of abundances for exoplanet atmospheres and, therefore, should be used in combination with UV/Optical and near-infrared observations to obtain robust constraints on abundances, C/O, and metallicity. In particular, even though we can detect the CO$_2$ feature with just NIRCam, we cannot constrain its abundances robustly without the optical baseline.