Veiled in Starlight: Impacts of Stellar Contamination on Retrievals of TRAPPIST-1f's Atmospheric Composition

The TRAPPIST-1 system offers seven terrestrial exoplanets with tight orbits and large radii ratios to the host star. If an atmosphere exists, transmission spectroscopy can be used to detect specific atmospheric features. Predictions of the atmospheric detectability of the TRAPPIST-1 planets prior to the launch of \textit{JWST} assumed pristine stellar surfaces. However, initial \textit{JWST} observations of the TRAPPIST-1 planets demonstrate that stellar contamination from unocculted active regions imparts significantly stronger spectral features than any planetary atmospheres. Here, we evaluate the atmospheric detectability of the habitable zone planet TRAPPIST-1f using atmospheric retrievals accounting for stellar contamination. We model a transmission spectrum given a CO$_2$-rich, habitable atmospheric model, and we include a "worst case" stellar contamination spectrum. We then perform atmospheric retrievals on simulated \textit{JWST} observations with MIRI LRS (5-15 \micron) and NIRSpec PRISM (0.6-5.3 \micron), assuming accurate starspot spectral models. We find that NIRSpec observations alone achieve similar results as MIRI and NIRSpec together. We find $\sim$10 transits obtains strong evidence ($B>150$) for CO$_2$, and $\sim$50 transits finds weak evidence ($B>3$) for CH$_4$. We could not retrieve evidence of H$_2$O with up to 100 simulated transits with both instruments. Many challenges remain to accurately account for stellar contamination for ultra-cool M-dwarfs in atmospheric retrievals, and our results show that, while evidence for a CO$_2$-rich atmosphere around TRAPPIST-1f can be found with a short \textit{JWST} program, other prominent atmospheric signatures can only be disentangled from strong stellar features with more observation time than previous studies have indicated.

Source: arXiv:2608.06207v1 - http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06207v1 PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.06207v1 Original Link: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06207v1