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Uniformly hot nightside temperatures on short-period gas giants

Nature Astronomy volume 3, pages 1092–1098 (2019)Cite this article

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Abstract

Short-period gas giants (hot Jupiters) on circular orbits are expected to be tidally locked into synchronous rotation, with permanent daysides that face their host stars and permanent nightsides that face the darkness of space1. Thermal flux from the nightside of several hot Jupiters has been detected, meaning energy is transported from day to night in some fashion. However, it is not clear exactly what the physical information from these detections reveals about the atmospheric dynamics of hot Jupiters. Here we show that the nightside effective temperatures of a sample of 12 hot Jupiters are clustered around 1,100 K, with a slight upward trend as a function of stellar irradiation. The clustering is not predicted by cloud-free atmospheric circulation models2,3,4. This result can be explained if most hot Jupiters have nightside clouds that are optically thick to outgoing longwave radiation and hence radiate at the cloud-top temperature, and progressively disperse for planets receiving greater incident flux. Phase-curve observations at a greater range of wavelengths are crucial to determining the extent of cloud coverage, as well as the cloud composition on hot Jupiter nightsides5,6.

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Fig. 1: Dayside and nightside effective temperatures for 12 hot Jupiters, and one brown dwarf (KELT-1b).
Fig. 2: Best-fit models for the nightside temperatures of 12 hot Jupiters.
Fig. 3: Difference in brightness temperatures at Spitzer wavelengths 3.6 μm and 4.5 μm (ch1 and ch2) for the ten planets with both 3.6 μm and 4.5 μm phase curves.

Data availability

The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Code availability

The Gaussian process regression code used is publicly available and can be found at https://github.com/ekpass/gp-teff. The Spitzer Phase Curve Analysis pipeline is publicly available and can be found at https://github.com/lisadang27/SPCA.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank T. Bell for providing the updated energy balance model code, T. Komacek for providing his analytic day–night temperature difference code and L. Kreidberg for an early look at her WASP-103b phase-curve paper. Thanks to J. Mendonça for providing the phase-curve parameters from his WASP-43b paper. Thanks to E. Pass for an early look at her Gaussian process temperature estimate results. Thanks to J. Bean and V. Parmentier for helpful discussion and comments about the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada

    Dylan Keating, Nicolas B. Cowan & Lisa Dang

  2. McGill Space Institute, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada

    Dylan Keating, Nicolas B. Cowan & Lisa Dang

  3. Institut de Recherche sur les Exoplanètes, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada

    Dylan Keating, Nicolas B. Cowan & Lisa Dang

  4. Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada

    Nicolas B. Cowan

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Contributions

D.K. led the data analysis and wrote the manuscript. N.B.C. discussed ideas and contributed to writing the manuscript. L.D. provided the Spitzer data analysis pipeline and helped with reducing Spitzer phase curves.

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Correspondence to Dylan Keating.

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Peer review information: Nature Astronomy thanks Thaddeus Komacek and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Figs. 1–8 and Tables 1–3.

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Keating, D., Cowan, N.B. & Dang, L. Uniformly hot nightside temperatures on short-period gas giants. Nat Astron 3, 1092–1098 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-019-0859-z

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