Image Source.

August 1st marked the most recent ‘606 day, which came and went without wide remark. Perhaps this was because in late Summer, HD 80606 rises and sets in near-synch the Sun, and is thus lost from the Earth’s night skies.

At the moment, HD 80606b is headed back out toward apastron.

The global storms and shockwaves that were unleashed at the beginning of August are dissipating rapidly, and the flux of heat from the planet is likely fading back down to the sullen baseline glow that arises from tidal heating.

HD 80606’s next periastron passage occurs on November 20th, and the Spitzer Space Telescope is scheduled to observe the whole event (details here). It’s going to be a big deal. Spitzer can only observe HD 80606 during two three-week windows each year, and fortunately, the Nov. 20th Periastron passage occurs during one of these windows. It’s literally the only opportunity to catch HD 80606 b’s big swing before Spitzer’s cryogen runs out in 2009.

The orbital geometry of the periastron passage looks like this:

Each marker of the orbit is separated by one hour. The prediction for the pseudo-synchronous rotation of the planet is also indicated. The planet should be spinning with a period of 36.8 hours. Jonathan Langton’s hydrodynamics code predicts what the temperature distribution on the planet should look like at each moment from Spitzer’s viewpoint in our solar system:

Transitsearch.org observers have covered a number of the HD 80606 b transit opportunities, and it seems pretty certain that the planet doesn’t transit. This isn’t surprising. The geometry of the orbit is such that when the planet crosses the plane containing the line of sight to the Earth, it’s quite a distance away from the star. Not so, however, for the secondary transit. There’s a very respectable 15% chance that Spitzer will detect a secondary transit centered two hours prior to the periastron passage.

Even if the planet doesn’t transit, we should be able to get a good sense of the orbital inclination from the shape of the light curve. If the orbit is nearly in the plane of the sky, then we should see a steady rise followed by a plateau in the 8-micron flux coming from the planet. For more nearly edge-on configurations, the flux peak should be clearly discernable. The observations are scheduled to start 20 hours prior to periastron and end 10 hours after.

Image Source.

HAT-P-2b. The name doesn’t exactly ring of grandeur, but this planet — a product of Gáspár Bakos’ HAT Net transit survey — is poised to give the Spitzer Space Telescope its most dramatic glimpse to date of a hot Jupiter.

HAT-P-2b’s orbit is remarkably eccentric for a planet with an orbital period of only 5.6 days, and by a stroke of luck, periastron is located almost exactly midway between the primary and the secondary transits (as viewed from Earth). The strength of the stellar insolation at periastron is nine times as strong as at apastron, which more than guarantees that the planet will have disaster-movie-ready weather.

On June 6th, Josh Winn and his collaborators used the Keck telescope to obtain 97 radial velocities for HAT-P-2. The observations were timed to occur before, during, and after primary transit, and the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect is clearly visible in their data (preprint here):

The symmetry of the Rossitered points indicates that the angular momentum vector of the planetary orbit is aligned with the spin pole of the star:

This state of affairs also holds true for the other transiting planets — HD 209458b, HD 149026b, HD 189733b — for which the effect has been measured. The observed alignments are evidence in favor of disk migration as the mechanism for producing hot Jupiters.

With its apparent magnitude of V=8.7, the HAT-P-2b parent star is roughly ten times brighter than the average planet-bearing star discovered in a wide-field transit survey. The star is bright enough, in fact, to have earned an entry in both the Henry Draper Catalog (HD 147506) and the Hipparcos Database (HIP 80076), but with its surface temperature of 6300K (F8 spectral type) it was too hot to have been a sure-fire “add” to the ongoing radial velocity surveys. Prior to this May, it had been entirely ignored in the astronomical literature (save a brief mention in this paper from 1969).

HAT-P-2’s intrisic brightness and its planet’s orbital geometry mean that in a relatively compact 34-hour observation, Spitzer can collect on the most interesting features of the orbit with high signal-to-noise. In particular, there is an excellent opportunity to measure the rate at which the day-side atmosphere heats up during the close approach to the star. The planet, in fact, presents such a remarkable situation that a block of Director’s Discretionary time was awarded so that the observations can be made during the current GO-4 cycle. They’ll be occurring soon.

Both HAT-P-2b and HD 80606 b will provide a crucial ground truth for extrasolar planetary climate simulations. Jonathan Langton’s current model, for example, predicts that that the temperatures on HAT-P-2b will range over more than 1000K. At the four times shown in the above orbital diagram, the hemisphere facing Earth is predicted to show the following appearances:

Spitzer, of course, can’t resolve the planetary disk. It measures the total amount of light coming from the planet in chosen passband. At 8-microns, the planet’s light curve should look like this:

The temperature maps only hint at the complex dynamics of the surface flow. A better indication is given by the distribution of vorticity,

which we’ll pick up in the next post…

Image Source.

Regular oklo readers will recall Gillon et al.’s discovery that the Neptune-mass planet orbiting the red dwarf star Gl 436 can be observed in transit. Transitsearch got scooped, and the whole eposide got me all worked up enough to neglect the exigencies of everyday academic life and reel off three straight posts on the detection and its consequences (see here, here, here, and also here). The transits of Gl 436 b are a big deal because they indicate that the planet is possibly composed largely of water. It’s not a bare rock and it’s not a Jupiter-like gas giant. Rather, it’s consistent with being a fully Neptune-like object, hauled in for inspection on a 2.64385 day orbit.

Following Gillon et al.’s announcement, it became clear that Gl 436 transits would fit into a window of observability during the June 24th – July 04 IRAC campaign on the Spitzer Space Telescope. The red dwarf parent star, furthermore, because of its proximity, is bright enough for Spitzer to achieve good photometric signal-to-noise at 8-microns. As a result, Joe Harrington’s Spitzer Target of Opportunity GO-4 proposal was triggered, and the Deep Space Network radioed instructions to the spacecraft to observe the primary transit on June 29th, as well as the secondary eclipse (when the planet passes behind the star) on June 30th, a bit more than half an orbit later. Joe, along with his students Sarah Navarro and William Bowman, and collaborators Drake Deming, Sara Seager, and Karen Horning asked me if I wanted to participate in the analysis. After watching all the ‘436 action from the sidelines in May, I was more than happy to sign up!

One of the most exciting aspects of being a scientist is the round-the-clock push to get a time-sensitive result in shape for publication. There’s a fantastic sense of camaraderie as e-mails, calculations, figures and drafts fly back and forth. On Monday afternoon PDT (shortly after midnight GMT) when Mike Valdez sent out his daily astro-ph summary, it was suddenly clear that we were under tremendous pressure to get our results analyzed and submitted. The Geneva team had swooped in and downloaded the data for the primary transit the moment it was released to the community! They had cranked out a reduction, an analysis, and a paper, all within 48 hours. Their light curve confirmed the ground-based observations. Spitzer’s high-quality photometry indicates that the planet is slightly larger than had been indicated by the ground-based transit observations. Drake submitted our paper yesterday afternoon.

Fortunately for us, the real prize from Spitzer is the secondary eclipse. Its timing is capable of independently confirming that the orbit is eccentric, and the depth gives an indication of the surface temperature on the planet itself.

The upper panel of the following figure shows the raw Spitzer photometry during the secondary eclipse window. IRAC photometry at 8 μm is known to exhibit a gradually increasing ramp-up in sensitivity, due to filling of charge traps in the detectors, but even before this effect is modeled and subtracted, the secondary transit is visible to the eye. The bottom panel shows the secondary transit in detail.

The secondary transit occurs 58.7% of an orbit later than the primary transit, which proves that the orbit is eccentric. A detailed fit to the transit times and to the radial velocities indicates that the orbital eccentricity is e=0.15 — halfway between that of Mars (e=0.1) and Mercury (e=0.2). The orbital geometry can be drawn to scale in a diagram that’s 440 pixels across:

The depth of the secondary eclipse is 0.057%, which allowed us to estimate a 712 ± 36K temperature for the planetary surface.

A temperature of 700+ K is hotter than expected. If we assume that the planet absorbs all the energy that it gets from the star and re-radiates its heat uniformly from the entire planetary surface, then the temperature should be T = 642 K. The higher temperature implied by the secondary eclipse depth could arise from inefficient transport of heat to the night side of the planet, from a non-“blackbody” planetary emission spectrum, from tidal heating, or from a combination of the three. If the excess heat is all coming from tidal dissipation, then the Q-value for the planet is 7000, suggesting that it’s a bit more dissipative inside than Uranus and Neptune.

What would Gl 436 b look like if we could go there? To dark adapted eyes, the night side is just barely hot enough to produce a faint reddish glow (as is the case on the surface of Venus, which has a similar temperature). The atmosphere is too hot for water clouds, and is likely transparent down to a fairly high atmospheric pressure level. The day-side probably reflects a #E0B0FF-colored hue that contrasts with the orange-yellow light of the star. The planet spins with a period of 2.32 days so that it can be as spin-synchronous as possible during the sector of its orbit closest to periastron. At a fixed longitude on the planet, the day drags on for 456 hours from high noon to high noon.

Jonathan Langton has been running atmospheric simulations with the latest parameters. On the phone, just a bit ago, he would only say that the preliminary results were “interesting”…