Abstract
Ultraviolet wavelengths offer unique insights into aerosols in exoplanetary atmospheres. However, only a handful of exoplanets have been observed in the ultraviolet to date. Here, we present the ultraviolet-visible transmission spectrum of the inflated hot Jupiter WASP-127b. We observed one transit of WASP-127b with WFC3/UVIS G280 as part of the Hubble Ultraviolet-optical Survey of Transiting Legacy Exoplanets, obtaining a transmission spectrum from 200 to 800 nm. Our reductions yielded a broadband transit depth precision of 91 ppm and a median precision of 240 ppm across 59 spectral channels. Our observations are suggestive of a high-altitude cloud layer with forward modeling showing they are composed of submicron particles and retrievals indicating a high-opacity patchy cloud. While our UVIS/G280 data only offer weak evidence for Na, adding archival Hubble Space Telescope (HST) WFC3/IR and STIS observations raises the overall Na detection significance to 4.1σ. Our work demonstrates the capabilities of HST WFC3/UVIS G280 observations to probe the aerosols and atmospheric composition of transiting hot Jupiters with comparable precision to HST STIS.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 23 |
| Number of pages | 18 |
| Journal | Astronomical Journal |
| Volume | 169 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Early online date | 12 Dec 2024 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Jan 2025 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2024. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.
Keywords
- Extrasolar gaseous giant planets
- Transmission spectroscopy
- Exoplanets
- Exoplanet atmospheres