A Detailed Investigation of HD 209458 b HST & JWST Transmission Spectra with SANSAR

HD 209458 b is the first exoplanet on which an atmosphere was detected. Since then, its atmosphere has been investigated using multiple telescopes and instruments. However, many of its atmospheric constraints remain debatable.

While HST observations suggested a highly sub-solar metallicity, recent JWST NIRCam observations by Xue et al. 2024 constrained a super-solar metallicity with highly sub-solar C/O. In this work, we show a detailed investigation of HD 209458 b transmission spectra observations from JWST and HST using SANSAR, a newly developed planetary atmosphere modeling framework, with free, equilibrium chemistry and self-consistent grid retrievals.

The overall best-fitting model with free retrievals (χ²_red=1.21) constrains its metallicity and C/O to be highly sub-solar, while equilibrium chemistry and grid retrievals (χ²_red=1.27 and 1.30, respectively) are consistent with solar values using STIS+WFC3+NIRCam observations.

The retrieved abundances of H₂O and CO₂ are almost three orders of magnitude lower (highly sub-solar) with STIS+WFC3+NIRCam compared to just NIRCam, using free retrievals. NIRCam observations alone also result in misleading constraints on metallicity and C/O, with equilibrium chemistry and grid retrieval.

We find that the model choice of varying C/H or O/H to vary the C/O in equilibrium chemistry retrievals leads to different metallicity constraints with NIRCam, but similar constraints with STIS+WFC3+NIRCam. We conclude that NIRCam observations alone can lead to overestimation of abundances for exoplanet atmospheres and, therefore, should be used in combination with UV/Optical and near-infrared observations to obtain robust constraints on abundances, C/O, and metallicity.

Specifically, even though we can detect the CO₂ feature with just NIRCam, we cannot constrain its abundances robustly without the optical baseline.

Side view schematic of a planet in transit being observed by a telescope (JWST).

Avinash Verma, Jayesh Goyal, Swaroop Avarsekar, Gaurav Shukla

Comments: Accepted for Publication in The Astronomical Journal (AJ). 39 pages and 20 Figures
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:2505.04413 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2505.04413v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2505.04413
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Submission history
From: Jayesh Goyal
[v1] Wed, 7 May 2025 13:47:49 UTC (19,411 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.04413
Astrobiology, Astrochemistry,