Tag Archives: Spitzer Space Telescope

Night-side temperatures of hot Jupiters

A team from McGill University have put out a press release about the nightsides of hot Jupiter exoplanets, which, given that hot Jupiters are phase-locked, always point away from their star. Dylan Keating et al collected observations with the Spitzer Space Telescope for a sample of 12 hot Jupiters, including 7 WASP exoplanets.

They find that, while the heated daysides show a range of temperatures, the nightsides always have a similar temperature:

“The uniformity of the nightside temperatures suggests that clouds on this side of the planets are likely very similar to one another in composition. Our data suggest that these clouds are likely made of minerals such as manganese sulfide or silicates, or rocks”, Keating explained.

Caption: Schematic of clouds on the night side of a hot Jupiter exoplanet. The underlying atmosphere is over 800 C, hot enough to vaporize rocks. Atmospheric motion from the deep atmosphere or from the hotter dayside bring the rock vapour to cooler regions, where it condenses into clouds, and possibly rains down into the atmosphere below. These clouds of condensed rock block outgoing thermal radiation, making the planet’s nightside appear relatively cool from space. Credit: McGill University

The work has led to press coverage by Fox News, Sci News, UPI, and other websites.

Night-side clouds on hot Jupiters

Thomas Beatty et al have an interesting new paper on arXiv today, primarily about the transiting brown dwarf KELT-1b. They’ve used the Spitzer Space Telescope to record the infra-red light as it varies around the 1.3-day orbit.

They end up with the following plots (KELT-1b is on the right, with the plot for the planet WASP-43b on the left):

The x-axis is “colour”, the difference in flux between two infra-red passbands at 3.6 and 4.5 microns. The y-axis is brightness (in the 3.6 micron band). The underlying orange and red squares show where typical M-dwarf stars and L and T brown dwarfs fall on the plot.

The solid-line “loops” are then the change in position of the atmospheres of KELT-1b and WASP-43b around their orbits. At some phases we see their “day” side, heated by the flux of their star, and at others we see their cooler “night” side.

The blue line is the track where something would lie if there were no clouds in its atmosphere. The fact that KELT-1b’s loop doesn’t follow the blue track, but moves significantly right (to cooler colours) implies that the night side of the brown dwarf must be cloudy. The night side of WASP-43b, however, appears to be less cloudy, according to its track.

Here are the same plots for two more planets:

The plot for WASP-19b shows a loop with a marked excursion to the right, suggesting a cloudy night side to the planet. For WASP-18b, however, the loop follows a trajectory nearer the blue “no cloud” track, suggesting a clearer atmosphere.

Water Is Destroyed, Then Reborn in Ultrahot Jupiters

NASA JPL have put out a press release about ultra-hot Jupiters including WASP-18b, WASP-103b and WASP-121b.

The work, led by Vivien Parmentier, used the Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes to study how the planets’ atmospheres change from the irradiated day side to the cooler night side.

“Due to strong irradiation on the planet’s daysides, temperatures there get so intense that water molecules are completely torn apart. […] fierce winds may blow the sundered water molecules into the planets’ nightside hemispheres. On the cooler, dark side of the planet, the atoms can recombine into molecules and condense into clouds, all before drifting back into the dayside to be splintered again.”

Simulated views of the ultrahot Jupiter WASP-121b show what the planet might look like to the human eye from five different vantage points, illuminated to different degrees by its parent star. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Vivien Parmentier/Aix-Marseille University)

“With these studies, we are bringing some of the century-old knowledge gained from studying the astrophysics of stars, to the new field of investigating exoplanetary atmospheres,” said Parmentier.

Harvard’s CfA have also produced a press release on the work, focusing on the analysis of WASP-103b led by Laura Kreidberg.

“A crucial observational advance by Kreidberg and her team was that they observed the planet for an entire orbit, enabling them to map the climate at every longitude and derive detailed information about the temperatures on the planet’s dayside and nightside. This is only the second time that such a complete exoplanet observation has been performed with HST.”