Enriched volatiles and refractories but deficient titanium on the dayside atmosphere of WASP-121b revealed by JWST/NIRISS

TL;DR

This study analyzes JWST/NIRISS observations of WASP-121b's dayside atmosphere, revealing enrichment in volatiles and refractories but a deficiency in titanium, influenced by thermal dissociation and cold-trapping effects.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed atmospheric composition analysis of WASP-121b using JWST data, highlighting the impact of thermal dissociation and cold-traps on elemental abundances.

Findings

WASP-121b's atmosphere shows a stratospheric inversion with temperatures over 3000K.

The atmosphere is metal-enriched (~10x stellar) but titanium-poor (~1x stellar).

H2O dissociation significantly affects retrieval results.

Abstract

With dayside temperatures elevated enough for all atmospheric constituents to be present in gas form, ultra-hot Jupiters offer a unique opportunity to probe the composition of giant planets. We aim to infer the composition and thermal structure of the dayside atmosphere of the ultra-hot Jupiter WASP-121b from two NIRISS$/$SOSS secondary eclipses observed as part of a full phase curve. We extract the eclipse spectrum of WASP-121b with two independent data reduction pipelines and analyse it using different atmospheric retrieval prescriptions to explore the effects of thermal dissociation, reflected light, and titanium condensation on the inferred atmospheric properties. We find that the observed dayside spectrum of WASP-121b is best fit by atmosphere models possessing a stratospheric inversion with temperatures reaching over 3000K, with spectral contributions from H2O, CO, VO, H-, and either TiO or reflected light. We measure the atmosphere of WASP-121b to be metal enriched (~10x stellar) but comparatively titanium poor (~1x stellar), potentially due to partial cold-trapping. The inferred C/O depends on model assumptions such as whether reflected light is included, ranging from being consistent with stellar if a geometric albedo of zero is assumed to being super-stellar for a freely fitted Ag = 0.16 +/- 0.02. The volatile-to-refractory ratio is measured to be consistent with the stellar value. We infer that WASP-121b has an atmosphere enriched in both volatile and refractory metals, but not in ultra-refractory titanium, suggesting the presence of a nightside cold-trap. Considering H2O dissociation is critical in free retrieval analyses, leading to order-of-magnitude differences in retrieved abundances for WASP-121b if neglected. Simple chemical equilibrium retrievals assuming that all species are governed by a single metallicity parameter drastically overpredict the TiO abundance.