Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Probing The Haze In The Atmosphere Of Hd 189733b With Hubble Space Telescope/Wfc3 Transmission Spectroscopy, Neale P. Gibson, Suzanne Aigrain, Frederic Pont, David K. Sing, Jean-Michel Désert, Thomas M. Evans, Gregory W. Henry, Nawal Husnoo, Heather Knutson

Information Systems and Engineering Management Research Publications

We present Hubble Space Telescope near-infrared transmission spectroscopy of the transiting exoplanet HD 189733b, using the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). This consists of time series spectra of two transits, used to measure the wavelength dependence of the planetary radius. These observations aim to test whether the Rayleigh scattering haze detected at optical wavelengths extends into the near-infrared, or if it becomes transparent leaving molecular features to dominate the transmission spectrum. Due to saturation and non-linearity affecting the brightest (central) pixels of the spectrum, light curves were extracted from the blue and red ends of the spectra only, corresponding to …