Abstract
The atmospheric composition of low-mass exoplanets is the object of intense observational and theoretical investigations. GJ3470b is a warm uranus recently detected in transit across a bright late-type star. The transit of this planet has already been observed in several band passes from the ground and space, allowing observers to draw an intriguing yet incomplete transmission spectrum of the planet atmospheric limb. In particular, published data in the visible suggest the existence of a Rayleigh scattering slope, making GJ3470b a unique case among the known neptunes, while data obtained beyond 2 um are consistent with a flat infrared spectrum. The unexplored near-infrared spectral region between 1 and 2 um, is thus key to undertanding the atmospheric nature of GJ3470b. Here, we report on the first space-borne spectrum of GJ3470, obtained during one transit of the planet with WFC3 on board HST, operated in stare mode. The spectrum covers the 1.1--1.7-um region with a resolution of about 300. We retrieve the transmission spectrum of GJ3470b with a chromatic planet-to-star radius ratio precision of 0.15% (about one scale height) per 40-nm bins. At this precision, the spectrum appears featureless, in good agreement with ground-based and Spitzer infrared data at longer wavelengths, pointing to a flat transmission spectrum from 1 to 5 um. We present new simulations of transmission spectra for GJ3470b, which allow us to show that the HST/WFC3 observations rule out cloudless hydrogen-rich atmospheres (>10 sigma) as well as hydrogen-rich atmospheres with tholin haze (>5 sigma). Adding our near-infrared measurements to the full set of previously published data from 0.3 to 5 um, we find that a cloudy, hydrogen-rich atmosphere can explain the full transmission spectrum if, at the terminator, the clouds are located at low pressures (<1 mbar) or the water mixing ratio is extremely low (<1 ppm).
Highlights
IntroductionWith the discovery of super-Earths such as GJ 1214b (Charbonneau et al 2009) or HD 97658b (Dragomir et al 2013; Van Grootel et al 2014), a mass continuum is observed from 1 M⊕ to 20–30 M⊕
Integrating the Wide Field Camera-3 (WFC3)/G141 transmission spectrum over the J band, we find a mean radius ratio of (7.7837 ± 0.0357)%, i.e. 3σ to 6σ higher than the ratio previously measured by Fukui et al (2013) in this band
We have considered a haze of tholins instead of sulfuric acid droplets, because it is the haze model stressed by Nascimbeni et al (2013, see their Fig. 2c) as providing the best fit to the radius ratio measurements of GJ 3470b known at the time of their publication
Summary
With the discovery of super-Earths such as GJ 1214b (Charbonneau et al 2009) or HD 97658b (Dragomir et al 2013; Van Grootel et al 2014), a mass continuum is observed from 1 M⊕ to 20–30 M⊕. This low-mass continuum seems to stop at Appendices are available in electronic form at http://www.aanda.org. It is useful to perform the flux calibration to compare our spectrum of GJ 3470 to model spectra and determine important stellar properties, such as the limb-darkening profile of the stellar surface. A mean uncalibrated GJ 3470 spectrum is calculated as the average of the 350 background-subtracted, flat-fielded spectra. By rescaling the model spectra to a distance of 33 pc – somewhat farther than the values reported by Bonfils et al (2012, 25.2 pc) and Demory et al (2013, 30.7 pc) – we obtain a reasonable match to the measured spectrum
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