THCA Seminar

Title： Ground-based Detections of Thermal Emission from the Dense Hot Jupiter WASP-43b in the H and K_s Bands Speaker： Dr.Wang Wei (NAOC) Time： Thursday, 13:30, Jan.2,2014 Place： Lecture Hall, Third floor, Science Building Abstract： We report new detections of thermal emission from the transiting hot Jupiter WASP-43b in the H and K_s bands as observed at secondary eclipses. The observations were made with the WIRCam instrument on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. We obtained a secondary eclipse depth of 0.103_{-0.017}^{+0.017}% and 0.194_{-0.029}^{+0.029}% in the H and K_s bands, respectively. The K_s-band depth is consistent with the previous measurement in the narrow band centered at 2.09 μm by Gillon et al. (2012). Our eclipse depths in both bands are consistent with a blackbody spectrum with a temperature of ~1850 K, slightly higher than the dayside equilibrium temperature without day-night energy redistribution. Based on theoretical models of the dayside atmosphere of WASP-43b, our data constrain the day-night energy redistribution in the planet to be < ~ 15%-25%, depending on the metal content in the atmosphere. combined with energy balance arguments, our data suggest that a strong temperature inversion is unlikely in the dayside atmosphere of wasp-43b. however, a weak inversion cannot be strictly ruled out at the current time. future observations are required to place detailed constraints on the chemical composition of the atmosphere.