https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.11692 close this message Accessible arXiv Do you navigate arXiv using a screen reader or other assistive technology? Are you a professor who helps students do so? We want to hear from you. Please consider signing up to share your insights as we work to make arXiv even more open. Share Insights Skip to main content Cornell University We gratefully acknowledge support from the Simons Foundation and member institutions. arxiv logo > astro-ph > arXiv:2208.11692 [ ] Help | Advanced Search [All fields ] Search arXiv logo Cornell University Logo [ ] GO quick links * Login * Help Pages * About Astrophysics > Earth and Planetary Astrophysics arXiv:2208.11692 (astro-ph) [Submitted on 24 Aug 2022] Title:Identification of carbon dioxide in an exoplanet atmosphere Authors:The JWST Transiting Exoplanet Community Early Release Science Team: Eva-Maria Ahrer (1 and 2), Lili Alderson (3), Natalie M. Batalha (4), Natasha E. Batalha (5), Jacob L. Bean (6), Thomas G. Beatty (7), Taylor J. Bell (8), Bjorn Benneke (9), Zachory K. Berta-Thompson (10), Aarynn L. Carter (4), Ian J. M. Crossfield (11), Nestor Espinoza (12 and 13), Adina D. Feinstein (6 and 14), Jonathan J. Fortney (4), Neale P. Gibson (15), Jayesh M. Goyal (16), Eliza M. -R. Kempton (17), James Kirk (18), Laura Kreidberg (19), Mercedes Lopez-Morales (18), Michael R. Line (20), Joshua D. Lothringer (21), Sarah E. Moran (22), Sagnick Mukherjee (4), Kazumasa Ohno (4), Vivien Parmentier (23 and 24), Caroline Piaulet (9), Zafar Rustamkulov (25), Everett Schlawin (26), David K. Sing (25 and 13), Kevin B. Stevenson (26), Hannah R. Wakeford (3), Natalie H. Allen (13 and 14), Stephan M. Birkmann (27), Jonathan Brande (11), Nicolas Crouzet (28), Patricio E. Cubillos (29 and 30), Mario Damiano (31), Jean-Michel Desert (32), Peter Gao (33), Joseph Harrington (34), Renyu Hu (31 and 35), Sarah Kendrew (27), Heather A. Knutson (35), Pierre-Olivier Lagage (36), Jeremy Leconte (37), Monika Lendl (38), Ryan J. MacDonald (39), E. M. May (26), Yamila Miguel (28 and 40), Karan Molaverdikhani (41 and 42 and 19), Julianne I. Moses (43), Catriona Anne Murray (10), Molly Nehring (10), Nikolay K. Nikolov (12), D. J. M. Petit dit de la Roche (38), Michael Radica (9), Pierre-Alexis Roy (9), Keivan G. Stassun (44), Jake Taylor (9), William C. Waalkes (10), Patcharapol Wachiraphan (10), Luis Welbanks (20 and 45), Peter J. Wheatley (2 and 1), Keshav Aggarwal (46), Munazza K. Alam (33), Agnibha Banerjee (47), Joanna K. Barstow (47), Jasmina Blecic (48), S. L. Casewell (49), Quentin Changeat (50), K. L. Chubb (51), Knicole D. Colon (52), Louis-Philippe Coulombe (9), Tansu Daylan (53 and 54), Miguel de Val-Borro (55), Leen Decin (56), Leonardo A. Dos Santos (12), Laura Flagg (39), Kevin France (57), Guangwei Fu (17 and 13), A. Garcia Munoz (36), John E. Gizis (58), Ana Glidden (59 and 60), David Grant (3), Kevin Heng (61), Thomas Henning (19), Yu-Cian Hong (39), Julie Inglis (35), Nicolas Iro (62), Tiffany Kataria (31), Thaddeus D. Komacek (17), Jessica E. Krick (63), Elspeth K.H. Lee (64), Nikole K. Lewis (39), Jorge Lillo-Box (65), Jacob Lustig-Yaeger (26), Luigi Mancini (66 and 19 and 67), Avi M. Mandell (52), Megan Mansfield (26 and 45), Mark S. Marley (22), Thomas Mikal-Evans (19), Giuseppe Morello (68 and 69 and 70), Matthew C. Nixon (71), Kevin Ortiz Ceballos (18), Anjali A. A. Piette (33), Diana Powell (18), Benjamin V. Rackham (59 and 60 and 72), Lakeisha Ramos-Rosado (13), Emily Rauscher (73), Seth Redfield (74), Laura K. Rogers (71), Michael T. Roman (49 and 75), Gael M. Roudier (31), Nicholas Scarsdale (4), Evgenya L. Shkolnik (20), John Southworth (76), Jessica J. Spake (35), Maria E Steinrueck (19), Xianyu Tan (23), Johanna K. Teske (33), Pascal Tremblin (77), Shang-Min Tsai (23), Gregory S. Tucker (78), Jake D. Turner (39 and 46), Jeff A. Valenti (12), Olivia Venot (79), Ingo P. Waldmann (50), Nicole L. Wallack (35), Xi Zhang (80), Sebastian Zieba (19 and 28) ((1) Department of Physics, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK, (2) Centre for Exoplanets and Habitability, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK, (3) School of Physics, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK, (4) Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA, (5) NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, USA, (6) Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA, (7) Department of Astronomy, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI USA, (8) BAER Institute, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffet Field, CA, USA, (9) Department of Physics and Institute for Research on Exoplanets, Universite de Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada, (10) Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA, (11) Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA, (12) Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD, USA, (13) Department of Physics & Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA, (14) NSF Graduate Research Fellow, (15) School of Physics, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland, (16) School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, National Institute of Science Education and Research, HBNI, Odisha, India, (17) Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA, (18) Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, Cambridge, MA, USA, (19) Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany, (20) School of Earth and Space Exploration, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA, (21) Department of Physics, Utah Valley University, Orem, UT, USA, (22) Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA, (23) Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics, Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, (24) Universite de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, Observatoire de la Cote d'Azur, Nice, France, (25) Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA, (26) Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA, (27) Johns Hopkins APL, Laurel, MD, USA, (28) European Space Agency, Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD, USA, (29) Leiden Observatory, University of Leiden, Leiden, The Netherlands, (30) INAF Osservatorio Astrofisico di Torino, Pino Torinese, Italy, (31) Space Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Graz, Austria, (32) Astrophysics Section, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA, (33) Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, (34) Earth and Planets Laboratory, Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington, DC, USA, (35) Planetary Sciences Group, Department of Physics and Florida Space Institute, University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida, USA, (36) Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA, (37) Universite Paris-Saclay, Universite Paris Cite, Gif-sur-Yvette, France, (38) Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux, Universite de Bordeaux, Pessac, France, (39) Departement d'Astronomie, Universite de Geneve, Sauverny, Switzerland, (40) Department of Astronomy and Carl Sagan Institute, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA, (41) SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research, Leiden, the Netherlands, (42) Universitats-Sternwarte, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen, Munchen, Germany, (43) Exzellenzcluster Origins, Garching, Germany, (44) Space Science Institute, Boulder, CO, USA, (45) Department of Physics and Astronomy, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA, (46) NHFP Sagan Fellow, (47) Indian Institute of Technology, Indore, India, (48) School of Physical Sciences, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK, (49) Department of Physics, New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, UAE, (50) School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester, Leicester, (51) Department of Physics and Astronomy, University College London, United Kingdom, (52) Centre for Exoplanet Science, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK, (53) NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA, (54) Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA, (55) LSSTC Catalyst Fellow, (56) Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, AZ, USA, (57) Institute of Astronomy, Department of Physics and Astronomy, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, (58) Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA, (59) Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA, (60) Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA, (61) Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA, (62) University Observatory Munich, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, Germany, (63) Institute for Astrophysics, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria, (64) Astrophysics Section, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA, (65) Center for Space and Habitability, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland, (66) Centro de Astrobiologia (CAB, CSIC-INTA), Departamento de Astrofisica, ESAC campus, Villanueva de la Canada (Madrid), Spain, (67) Department of Physics, University of Rome "Tor Vergata", Rome, Italy, (68) INAF Turin Astrophysical Observatory, Pino Torinese, Italy, (69) Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC), Tenerife, Spain, (70) Departamento de Astrofisica, Universidad de La Laguna (ULL), Tenerife, Spain, (71) INAF Palermo Astronomical Observatory, Piazza del Parlamento, Palermo, Italy, (72) Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK, (73) 51 Pegasi b Fellow, (74) Department of Astronomy, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA, (75) Astronomy Department and Van Vleck Observatory, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, USA, (76) Universidad Adolfo Ibanez Penalolen, Santiago, CL, (77) Astrophysics Group, Keele University, Staffordshire, UK, (78) Maison de la Simulation, CEA, CNRS, Univ. Paris-Sud, UVSQ, Universite Paris-Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, France, (79) Department of Physics, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA, (80) Universite de Paris Cite and Universite Paris Est Creteil, CNRS, LISA, Paris, France, (81) Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California, USA) et al. (32 additional authors not shown) You must enable JavaScript to view entire author list. Download PDF Abstract: Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a key chemical species that is found in a wide range of planetary atmospheres. In the context of exoplanets, CO2 is an indicator of the metal enrichment (i.e., elements heavier than helium, also called "metallicity"), and thus formation processes of the primary atmospheres of hot gas giants. It is also one of the most promising species to detect in the secondary atmospheres of terrestrial exoplanets. Previous photometric measurements of transiting planets with the Spitzer Space Telescope have given hints of the presence of CO2 but have not yielded definitive detections due to the lack of unambiguous spectroscopic identification. Here we present the detection of CO2 in the atmosphere of the gas giant exoplanet WASP-39b from transmission spectroscopy observations obtained with JWST as part of the Early Release Science Program (ERS). The data used in this study span 3.0 to 5.5 {\mu}m in wavelength and show a prominent CO2 absorption feature at 4.3 {\mu}m (26{\sigma} significance). The overall spectrum is well matched by one-dimensional, 10x solar metallicity models that assume radiative-convective-thermochemical equilibrium and have moderate cloud opacity. These models predict that the atmosphere should have water, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen sulfide in addition to CO2, but little methane. Furthermore, we also tentatively detect a small absorption feature near 4.0 {\mu}m that is not reproduced by these models. 27 pages, 6 figures, Accepted for publication in Nature, Comments: data and models available at https://doi.https://doi.org/ 10.5281/zenodo.6959427 Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP) Cite as: arXiv:2208.11692 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2208.11692v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2208.11692 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite Submission history From: Natalie Batalha Dr. [view email] [v1] Wed, 24 Aug 2022 17:52:36 UTC (2,186 KB) Full-text links: Download: * PDF only [by-4] Current browse context: astro-ph.EP < prev | next > new | recent | 2208 Change to browse by: astro-ph References & Citations * NASA ADS * Google Scholar * Semantic Scholar a export bibtex citation Loading... 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