Journal
ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL LETTERS
Volume 835, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/835/1/L12
Keywords
planets and satellites: atmospheres; planets and satellites: individual (WASP-101b); techniques: spectroscopic
Categories
Funding
- NASA [NAS 5-26555]
- NASA Postdoctoral Program at Goddard Space Flight Center
- European Research Council under the European Unions Seventh Framework Programme/ERC [336792]
- Royal Astronomical Society Research Fellowship
- National Centre for Competence in Research PlanetS - Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
- CNES (France) under project PACES
- [GO-14767]
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We present results from the first observations of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Panchromatic Comparative Exoplanet Treasury program for WASP-101b, a highly inflated hot Jupiter and one of the community targets proposed for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Early Release Science (ERS) program. From a single HST Wide Field Camera 3 observation, we find that the near-infrared transmission spectrum of WASP-101b contains no significant H2O absorption features and we rule out a clear atmosphere at 13 sigma. Therefore, WASP-101b is not an optimum target for a JWST ERS program aimed at observing strong molecular transmission features. We compare WASP-101b to the well-studied and nearly identical hot Jupiter WASP-31b. These twin planets show similar temperature-pressure profiles and atmospheric features in the near-infrared. We suggest exoplanets in the same parameter space as WASP-101b and WASP-31b will also exhibit cloudy transmission spectral features. For future HST exoplanet studies, our analysis also suggests that a lower count limit needs to be exceeded per pixel on the detector in order to avoid unwanted instrumental systematics.
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