We report high-resolution spectroscopic detection of TiO molecular signature in the day-side spectra of WASP-33 b, the second hottest known hot Jupiter. We used High-Dispersion Spectrograph (HDS; R ∼ 165,000) in the wavelength range of 0.62 -0.88 µm with the Subaru telescope to obtain the day-side spectra of WASP-33 b. We suppress and correct the systematic effects of the instrument, the telluric and stellar lines by using SYSREM algorithm after the selection of good orders based on Barnard star and other M-type stars. We detect a 4.8-σ signal at an orbital velocity of K p = +237.5 −1 , which agree with the derived values from the previous analysis of primary transit. Our detection with the temperature inversion model implies the existence of stratosphere in its atmosphere, however, we were unable to constrain the volume-mixing ratio of the detected TiO. We also measure the stellar radial velocity and use it to obtain a more stringent constraint on the orbital velocity, K p = 239.0Our results demonstrate that high-dispersion spectroscopy is a powerful tool to characterize the atmosphere of an exoplanet, even in the optical wavelength range, and show a promising potential in using and developing similar techniques with high-dispersion spectrograph on current 10m-class and future extremely large telescopes.

The recently introduced discrete persistent structure extractor (DisPerSE, Sousbie, Paper I) is implemented on realistic 3D cosmological simulations and observed redshift catalogues; it is found that DisPerSE traces very well the observed filaments, walls and voids seen both in simulations and in observations. In either setting, filaments are shown to connect on to haloes, outskirt walls, which circumvent voids, as is topologically required by the Morse theory. Indeed this algorithm returns the optimal critical set while operating directly on the particles. DisPerSE, as illustrated here, assumes nothing about the geometry of the survey or its homogeneity, and yields a natural (topologically motivated) self‐consistent criterion for selecting the significance level of the identified structures. It is shown that this extraction is possible even for very sparsely sampled point processes, as a function of the persistence ratio (a measure of the significance of topological connections between critical points). Hence, astrophysicists should be in a position to trace precisely the locus of filaments, walls and voids from such samples and assess the confidence of the post‐processed sets as a function of this threshold, which can be expressed relative to the expected amplitude of shot noise. In a cosmic framework, this criterion is shown to level with the friends‐of‐friends structure finder for the identification of peaks, while it also identifies the connected filaments and walls, and quantitatively recovers the full set of topological invariants (number of holes, etc.) directly from the particles, and at no extra cost as a function of the persistence threshold. This criterion is found to be sufficient even if one particle out of two is noise, when the persistence ratio is set to 3σ or more. The algorithm is also implemented on the SDSS catalogue and used to locate interesting configurations of the filamentary structure. In this context, we carried the identification of an ‘optically faint’ cluster at the intersection of filaments through the recent observation of its X‐ray counterpart by Suzaku.

Motivated by recent detection of transiting high-density super-Earths, we explore the detectability of hot rocky super-Earths orbiting very close to their host stars. In the environment hot enough for their rocky surfaces to be molten, they would have the atmosphere composed of gas species from the magma oceans. In this study, we investigate the radiative properties of the atmosphere that is in the gas/melt equilibrium with the underlying magma ocean. Our equilibrium calculations yield Na, K, Fe, Si, SiO, O, and O 2 as the major atmospheric species. We compile the radiative-absorption line data of those species available in literature, and calculate their absorption opacities in the wavelength region of 0.1-100 µm. Using them, we integrate the thermal structure of the atmosphere. Then, we find that thermal inversion occurs in the atmosphere because of the UV absorption by SiO. In addition, we calculate the ratio of the planetary to stellar emission fluxes during secondary eclipse, and find prominent emission features induced by SiO at 4 µm detectable by Spitzer, and those at 10 and 100 µm detectable by near-future space telescopes.

We report near-infrared measurements of the terminator region transmission spectrum and dayside emission spectrum of the exoplanet WASP-12b obtained using the HST WFC3 instrument. The disk-average dayside brightness temperature averages about 2900 K, peaking to 3200 K around 1.46 microns. We modeled a range of atmospheric cases for both the emission and transmission spectrum and confirm the recent finding by Crossfield et al. (2012b) that there is no evidence for C/O >1 in the atmosphere of WASP-12b. Assuming a physically plausible atmosphere, we find evidence that the presence of a number of molecules is consistent with the data, but the justification for inclusion of these opacity sources based on the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) is marginal. We also find the near-infrared primary eclipse light curve is consistent with small amounts of prolate distortion. As part of the calibration effort for these data, we conducted a detailed study of instrument systematics using 65 orbits of WFC3-IR grims observations. The instrument systematics are dominated by detector-related affects, which vary significantly depending on the detector readout mode. The 256x256 subarray observations of WASP 12 produced spectral measurements within 15% of the photon-noise limit using a simple calibration approach. Residual systematics are estimated to be less than 70 parts per million.Comment: Accepted for publication in Icaru

We analyze the high-resolution emission spectrum of WASP-33b taken using the High Dispersion Spectrograph (R ≈ 165,000) on the 8.2-m Subaru telescope. The data cover λ ≈ 6170-8817Å, divided over 30 spectral orders. The telluric and stellar lines are removed using a de-trending algorithm, SysRem, before cross-correlating with planetary spectral templates. We calculate the templates assuming a 1-D plane-parallel hydrostatic atmosphere including continuum opacity of bound-free H − and Rayleigh scattering by H 2 with a range of constant abundances of Fe i. Using a likelihood-mapping analysis, we detect an Fe i emission signature at 6.4-σ located at K p of 226.0 +2.1 −2.3 km s −1 and v sys of -3.2 +2.1 −1.8 km s −1 -consistent with the planet's expected velocity in the literature. We also confirm the existence of a thermal inversion in the day-side of the planet which is very likely to be caused by the presence of Fe i and previously-detected TiO in the atmosphere. This makes WASP-33b one of the prime targets to study the relative contributions of both species to the energy budget of an ultra-hot Jupiter.