Transit spectrophotometry of the exoplanet HD 189733b

I. Searching for water but finding haze with HST NICMOS

¹ UPMC Univ Paris 06, CNRS, Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, 98bis boulevard Arago, 75014 Paris, France e-mail: sing@iap.fr
² Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona, Sonett Space Science Building, Tucson, AZ 85721-0063, USA
³ Center of Excellence in Information Systems, Tennessee State University, 3500 John A. Merritt Blvd., Box 9501, Nashville, TN 37209, USA

Received: 29 June 2009
Accepted: 27 July 2009

Abstract

We present Hubble Space Telescope near-infrared transit photometry of the nearby hot-Jupiter HD 189733b. The observations were taken with the NICMOS instrument during five transits, with three transits executed with a narrowband filter at 1.87 μm and two performed with a narrowband filter at 1.66 μm. Our observing strategy using narrowband filters is insensitive to the usual HST intra-orbit and orbit-to-orbit measurement of systematic errors, allowing us to accurately and robustly measure the near-IR wavelength dependance of the planetary radius. Our measurements fail to reproduce the previously claimed detection of an absorption signature of atmospheric H₂O below 2 μm at a 5σ confidence level. We measure a planet-to-star radius contrast of at 1.66 μm and a contrast of at 1.87 μm. Both of our near-IR planetary radii values are in excellent agreement with the levels expected from Rayleigh scattering by sub-micron haze particles, observed at optical wavelengths, indicating that upper-atmospheric haze still dominates the near-IR transmission spectra over the absorption from gaseous molecular species at least below 2 μm.