A warm Neptune’s methane reveals core mass and vigorous atmospheric mixing

Abstract

Observations of transiting gas giant exoplanets have revealed a pervasive depletion of methane 1 – 4 , which has only recently been identified atmospherically 5 , 6 . The depletion is thought to be maintained by disequilibrium processes such as photochemistry or mixing from a hotter interior 7 – 9 . However, the interiors are largely unconstrained along with the vertical mixing strength and only upper limits on the CH 4 depletion have been available. The warm Neptune WASP-107b stands out among exoplanets with an unusually low density, reported low core mass 10 , and temperatures amenable to CH 4 , though previous observations have yet to find the molecule 2 , 4 . Here we present a JWST-NIRSpec transmission spectrum of WASP-107b that shows features from both SO 2 and CH 4 along with H 2 O, CO 2 , and CO. We detect methane with 4.2 σ significance at an abundance of 1.0 ± 0.5 ppm, which is depleted by 3 orders of magnitude relative to equilibrium expectations. Our results are highly constraining for the atmosphere and interior, which indicate the envelope has a super-solar metallicity of 43 ± 8 × solar, a hot interior with an intrinsic temperature of T int = 460 ± 40 K, and vigorous vertical mixing which depletes CH 4 with a diffusion coefficient of K zz = 10 11.6±0.1 cm 2 s −1 . Photochemistry has a negligible effect on the CH 4 abundance but is needed to account for the SO 2 . We infer a core mass of , which is much higher than previous upper limits 10 , releasing a tension with core-accretion models 11 .