BOWIE-ALIGN: Exploring degeneracies in the muted transmission spectrum of the aligned hot Jupiter NGTS-2b with NIRSpec/G395H

TL;DR

This study presents the first atmospheric characterization of the hot Jupiter NGTS-2b using JWST data, revealing weak molecular features, degeneracies in atmospheric composition, and potential chemical signatures like SO, highlighting challenges in retrievals.

Contribution

First atmospheric observation of NGTS-2b with JWST, analyzing degeneracies and biases in atmospheric retrievals for hot Jupiters orbiting aligned F stars.

Findings

Detection of weak H2O and CO2 features

Degeneracies due to clouds and metallicity

Possible SO absorption driven by limited data points

Abstract

We present the first atmospheric observation and characterisation of the aligned, 1468 K hot Jupiter, NGTS-2b, with one JWST NIRSpec/G395H transit. These observations complete the GO 3838 observing campaign of the BOWIE-ALIGN program, which aims to investigate the link between hot Jupiter atmospheric composition and formation history through the atmospheric analysis of planets orbiting F stars that are aligned and misaligned with the host stellar spin axis. The 2.84-5.18 micron spectrum shows weak absorption features attributed to H$_2$O and CO$_2$ absorption, which our free chemistry retrievals fit with posteriors that converge on high mean molecular weight solutions attained through significant H$_2$O mixing ratios. By comparing our results to interior modelling, we show that some of these solutions exceed the 43.5x solar upper limit we obtained from our interior structure models. Such solutions are likely due to cloud-metallicity degeneracies and insufficient wavelength coverage to resolve them. We show that, in the case of our observations, the likelihood distribution of H$_2$O abundances is flat and uninformative, such that our retrievals are biased by the prior. Additionally, our statistically favoured atmospheric solution contains absorption from SO. The chemical abundances retrieved with this model are likely not astrophysically feasible and we demonstrate that the presence of SO is driven by only two data points. Our equilibrium chemistry retrievals hint at a subsolar C/O ratio and supersolar metallicity; however, we find wide posterior distributions that extend to solar values.