Retrieving Exoplanet Atmospheres Using Planetary Infrared Excess: Prospects for the Night Side of WASP-43 b and Other Hot Jupiters

To increase the sample size of future atmospheric characterization efforts, we build on the planetary infrared excess (PIE) technique that has been proposed as a means to detect and characterize the thermal spectra of transiting and non-transiting exoplanets using sufficiently broad wavelength coverage to uniquely constrain the stellar and planetary spectral components from spatially unresolved observations. We performed simultaneous retrievals of stellar and planetary spectra for the archetypal planet WASP-43b in its original configuration and a non-transiting configuration to determine the efficacy of the PIE technique for characterizing the planet's night-side atmospheric thermal structure and composition using typical out-of-transit JWST observations. We found that using PIE with JWST should enable the stellar and planetary spectra to be disentangled with no degeneracies seen between the two flux sources, thus allowing robust constraints on the planet's night-side thermal structure and water abundance to be retrieved. The broad wavelength coverage achieved by combining spectra from NIRISS, NIRSpec, and MIRI enables PIE retrievals that are within 10% of the precision attained using traditional secondary eclipse measurements, although mid-IR observations with MIRI alone may face up to 3.5x lower precision on the planet's irradiation temperature. For non-transiting planets with unconstrained radius priors, we were able to identify and break the degeneracy between planet radius and irradiation temperature using data that resolved the peak of both the stellar and planetary spectra, thus potentially increasing the number of planets amenable to atmospheric characterization with JWST and other future mission concepts.

Automated summary

The study demonstrates that the PIE technique can effectively characterize the thermal structure and composition of exoplanets, allowing for the separation of stellar and planetary spectra observed with JWST, providing robust constraints without degeneracies. Combined broad wavelength coverage from different instruments can achieve precision comparable to traditional secondary eclipse measurements, although using only MIRI for observations may result in lower precision.