The Identification of CS2 and Evidence for Carbon-Sulfur Chemical Coupling in a Warm Giant Exoplanet Atmosphere

Transmission spectroscopy with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is revealing growing chemical complexity in giant exoplanet atmospheres. Of particular interest is sulfur, which had essentially no observational constraints before JWST.

Recent work has shown that a planet’s atmospheric sulfur content traces its refractory budget and is therefore a sensitive indicator of formation pathways. But despite the growing library of JWST data, the sulfur inventory of giant exoplanets remains poorly constrained: sulfur-bearing species are governed by disequilibrium chemistry and by kinetic networks that are still being revised.

Here we present a transmission spectrum of the warm giant planet WASP-80 b obtained with JWST/NIRCam and MIRI over 2.4,μm–10μm in three transits. We find evidence for H₂O, CH₄, CO₂, NH₃, and CS₂ in the atmosphere and place upper limits on CO and SO₂. Our atmospheric retrievals yield log10XCS₂=−2.25+0.33−0.32.

This CS₂ abundance is substantially higher than predicted by earlier sulfur-chemistry schemes for H₂-rich atmospheres in WASP-80 b’s temperature range, but is consistent with recent chemically validated networks that include efficient carbon-sulfur coupling through CH₂S.

These results identify CS₂ as an observable tracer of sulfur disequilibrium chemistry and provide observational support for theoretically predicted carbon-sulfur chemical coupling in giant exoplanet atmospheres.

Anastasia Triantafillides, Thomas G. Beatty, Matthew C. Nixon, Taylor J. Bell, Everett Schlawin, Luis Welbanks, Thomas P. Greene, Melinda Soares-Furtado, Jonathan J. Fortney Michael R. Line, Nishil Mehta, Sagnick Mukherjee, Matthew M. Murphy, Kazumasa Ohno, Vivien Parmentier, Yoav Rotman, Lindsey S. Wiser

Comments: 33 pages, 9 figure, 5 tables
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:2604.13168 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2604.13168v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.13168
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Submission history
From: Anastasia Triantafillides
[v1] Tue, 14 Apr 2026 18:00:05 UTC (8,996 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13168
Astrobiology, exoplanet,