Constraints on the Atmospheric Circulation and Variability of the Eccentric Hot Jupiter XO-3b

Abstract

We report secondary eclipse photometry of the hot Jupiter XO-3b in the 4.5~$\mu$m band taken with the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) on the Spitzer Space Telescope. We measure individual eclipse depths and center of eclipse times for a total of twelve secondary eclipses. We fit these data simultaneously with two transits observed in the same band in order to obtain a global best-fit secondary eclipse depth of $0.1580\pm 0.0036\%$ and a center of eclipse phase of $0.67004\pm 0.00013$. We assess the relative magnitude of variations in the dayside brightness of the planet by measuring the size of the residuals during ingress and egress from fitting the combined eclipse light curve with a uniform disk model and place an upper limit of 0.05$\%$. The new secondary eclipse observations extend the total baseline from one and a half years to nearly three years, allowing us to place an upper limit on the periastron precession rate of $2.9\times 10^{-3}$ degrees/day the tightest constraint to date on the periastron precession rate of a hot Jupiter. We use the new transit observations to calculate improved estimates for the system properties, including an updated orbital ephemeris. We also use the large number of secondary eclipses to obtain the most stringent limits to date on the orbit-to-orbit variability of an eccentric hot Jupiter and demonstrate the consistency of multiple-epoch Spitzer observations.

14 pages, 11 figures, published by ApJ

References in corpus (13)

• Achieving better than 1 minute accuracy in the Heliocentric and Barycentric Julian Dates
• Detection of Thermal Emission from an Extrasolar Planet
• The Transit Light Curve Project. IX. Evidence for a Smaller Radius of the Exoplanet XO-3b
• The Broadband Infrared Emission Spectrum of the Exoplanet HD 189733b
• Misaligned spin-orbit in the XO-3 planetary system?
• XO-3b: A Massive Planet in an Eccentric Orbit Transiting an F5V Star
• Atmospheric Circulation of Eccentric Hot Neptune GJ436b
• Pseudo 2D chemical model of hot Jupiter atmospheres: application to HD 209458b and HD 189733b
• Improved parameters for the transiting hot Jupiters WASP-4b and WASP-5b
• On the Spin-Orbit Misalignment of the XO-3 Exoplanetary System
• Observability of the General Relativistic Precession of Periastra in Exoplanets
• Hydrodynamic Simulations of Unevenly Irradiated Jovian Planets
• Hot Jupiter Variability in Eclipse Depth

Cited by in corpus (16)

• Observing transiting planets with JWST -- Prime targets and their synthetic spectral observations
• Balancing the Energy Budget of Short-Period Giant Planets: Evidence for Reflective Clouds and Optical Absorbers
• TESS Transit Timing of Hundreds of Hot Jupiters
• Empirical limb-darkening coefficients & transit parameters of known exoplanets from TESS
• ExoClock Project III: 450 new exoplanet ephemerides from ground and space observations
• ExoClock project II: A large-scale integrated study with 180 updated exoplanet ephemerides
• Investigating the physical properties of transiting hot Jupiters with the 1.5-m Kuiper Telescope
• A survey of exoplanet phase curves with Ariel
• A Lack of Variability Between Repeated Spitzer Phase Curves of WASP-43b
• Transit Timing Variation of XO-3b: Evidence for Tidal Evolution of Hot Jupiter with High Eccentricity
• Thermal Phase Curves of XO-3b: an Eccentric Hot Jupiter at the Deuterium Burning Limit
• TESS Timings of 31 Hot Jupiters with Ephemeris Uncertainties
• Precise Transit Photometry Using TESS: Updated Physical Properties for 28 Exoplanets Around Bright Stars
• Revisiting the Full Sets of Orbital Parameters for the XO-3 System: No evidence for Temporal Variation of the Spin-Orbit Angle
• Five new hot-Jupiter transits investigated with Swift-UVOT
• Random Forests applied to High Precision Photometry Analysis with Spitzer IRAC