Publication Date:
2014-10-11
Description:
Exoplanets that orbit close to their host stars are much more highly irradiated than their solar system counterparts. Understanding the thermal structures and appearances of these planets requires investigating how their atmospheres respond to such extreme stellar forcing. We present spectroscopic thermal emission measurements as a function of orbital phase ("phase-curve observations") for the highly irradiated exoplanet WASP-43b spanning three full planet rotations using the Hubble Space Telescope. With these data, we construct a map of the planet's atmospheric thermal structure, from which we find large day-night temperature variations at all measured altitudes and a monotonically decreasing temperature with pressure at all longitudes. We also derive a Bond albedo of 0.18(-0.12)(+0.07) and an altitude dependence in the hot-spot offset relative to the substellar point.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Stevenson, Kevin B -- Desert, Jean-Michel -- Line, Michael R -- Bean, Jacob L -- Fortney, Jonathan J -- Showman, Adam P -- Kataria, Tiffany -- Kreidberg, Laura -- McCullough, Peter R -- Henry, Gregory W -- Charbonneau, David -- Burrows, Adam -- Seager, Sara -- Madhusudhan, Nikku -- Williamson, Michael H -- Homeier, Derek -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2014 Nov 14;346(6211):838-41. doi: 10.1126/science.1256758. Epub 2014 Oct 9.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Chicago, 5640 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637, USA. NASA Sagan Fellow. kbs@uchicago.edu. ; CASA, Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences, University of Colorado, 389-UCB, Boulder, CO 80309, USA. ; Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA. ; Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Chicago, 5640 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637, USA. ; Department of Planetary Sciences and Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA. ; Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 North Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA. ; Center for Excellence in Information Systems, Tennessee State University, Nashville, TN 37209, USA. ; Department of Astronomy, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. ; Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. ; Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 54-1718, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. ; Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 OHA, UK. ; Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon, UMR 5574, CNRS, Universite de Lyon, Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon, 46 Allee d'Italie, F-69364 Lyon Cedex 07, France.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25301972" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
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Chemistry and Pharmacology
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Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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