An Upper Limit on the Albedo of HD 209458b: Direct Imaging Photometry with the<i>MOST</i>Satellite
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We present space-based photometry of the transiting exoplanetary system HD 209458 obtained with the MOST (Microvariablity and Oscillations of STars) satellite, spanning 14 days and covering 4 transits and 4 secondary eclipses. The HD 209458 photometry was obtained in MOST's lower-precision Direct Imaging mode, which is used for targets in the brightness range $6.5 < V < 13$. We describe the photometric reduction techniques for this mode of observing, in particular the corrections for stray Earthshine. We do not detect the secondary eclipse in the MOST data, to a limit in depth of 0.053 mmag (1 σ). We set a 1 σupper limit on the planet-star flux ratio of 4.88 x 10^-5 corresponding to a geometric albedo upper limit in the MOST bandpass (400 to 700 nm) of 0.25. The corresponding numbers at the 3 σlevel are 1.34 x 10^-4 and 0.68 respectively. HD 209458b is half as bright as Jupiter in the MOST bandpass. This low geometric albedo value is an important constraint for theoretical models of the HD209458b atmosphere, in particular ruling out the presence of reflective clouds. A second MOST campaign on HD 209458 is expected to be sensitive to an exoplanet albedo as low as 0.13 (1 sigma), if the star does not become more intrinsically variable in the meantime.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".