A high internal heat flux and large core in a warm Neptune exoplanet

Luis Welbanks (), Taylor J. Bell, Thomas G. Beatty, Michael R. Line, Kazumasa Ohno, Jonathan J. Fortney, Everett Schlawin, Thomas P. Greene, Emily Rauscher, Peter McGill, Matthew Murphy, Vivien Parmentier, Yao Tang, Isaac Edelman, Sagnick Mukherjee, Lindsey S. Wiser, Pierre-Olivier Lagage, Achrène Dyrek and Kenneth E. Arnold
Additional contact information
Luis Welbanks: Arizona State University
Taylor J. Bell: NASA’s Ames Research Center
Thomas G. Beatty: University of Wisconsin–Madison
Michael R. Line: Arizona State University
Kazumasa Ohno: University of California, Santa Cruz
Jonathan J. Fortney: University of California, Santa Cruz
Everett Schlawin: University of Arizona
Thomas P. Greene: NASA’s Ames Research Center
Emily Rauscher: University of Michigan
Peter McGill: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Matthew Murphy: University of Arizona
Vivien Parmentier: Université Côte d’Azur
Yao Tang: University of California, Santa Cruz
Isaac Edelman: NASA’s Ames Research Center
Sagnick Mukherjee: University of California, Santa Cruz
Lindsey S. Wiser: Arizona State University
Pierre-Olivier Lagage: Université Paris-Saclay, Université Paris Cité, CEA, CNRS, AIM
Achrène Dyrek: Université Paris-Saclay, Université Paris Cité, CEA, CNRS, AIM
Kenneth E. Arnold: University of Wisconsin–Madison

Nature, 2024, vol. 630, issue 8018, 836-840

Abstract: Abstract Interactions between exoplanetary atmospheres and internal properties have long been proposed to be drivers of the inflation mechanisms of gaseous planets and apparent atmospheric chemical disequilibrium conditions1. However, transmission spectra of exoplanets have been limited in their ability to observationally confirm these theories owing to the limited wavelength coverage of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and inferences of single molecules, mostly H2O (ref. 2). In this work, we present the panchromatic transmission spectrum of the approximately 750 K, low-density, Neptune-sized exoplanet WASP-107b using a combination of HST Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and JWST Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). From this spectrum, we detect spectroscopic features resulting from H2O (21σ), CH4 (5σ), CO (7σ), CO2 (29σ), SO2 (9σ) and NH3 (6σ). The presence of these molecules enables constraints on the atmospheric metal enrichment (M/H is 10–18× solar3), vertical mixing strength (log10Kzz = 8.4–9.0 cm2 s−1) and internal temperature (>345 K). The high internal temperature is suggestive of tidally driven inflation4 acting on a Neptune-like internal structure, which can naturally explain the large radius and low density of the planet. These findings suggest that eccentricity-driven tidal heating is a critical process governing atmospheric chemistry and interior-structure inferences for most of the cool (

Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07514-w

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