2014/10/08 by Kevin B. Stevenson, Jean-Michel Desert, Jean-Michel Désert +16 · 10 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astro and Planetary Science #Astrobiology #Astronomy #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Atmospheric sciences #Exoplanet #Hot Jupiter #Light curve #Meteorology #Physics #Planet #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #Thermal #astro-ph.EP #astro-ph.IM
paper · pdf · doi:10.1126/science.1256758
28 pages, 12 figures, 1 movie, includes supplementary materials, accepted for publication in Science. Also see two companion papers titled "A Precise Water Abundance Measurement for the Hot Jupiter WASP-43b" by Kreidberg et al. (2014b) and "The atmospheric circulation of the hot Jupiter WASP-43b: Comparing three-dimensional models to spectrophotometric data" by Kataria et al. (2014)
arxiv created 2014/10/08 · openalex publication_date 2014/10/10 · arxiv updated 2014/11/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
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.