Revisiting the Iconic Spitzer Phase Curve of 55 Cancri e: Hotter Dayside, Cooler Nightside, and Smaller Phase Offset
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Thermal phase curves of short-period exoplanets provide the best constraints on the atmospheric dynamics and heat transport in their atmospheres. The published Spitzer Space Telescope phase curve of 55 Cancri e, an ultra-short-period super-Earth, exhibits a large phase offset suggesting significant eastward heat recirculation, unexpected on such a hot planet. We present our rereduction and analysis of these iconic observations using the open source and modular Spitzer Phase Curve Analysis pipeline. In particular, we attempt to reproduce the published analysis using the same instrument detrending scheme as the original authors. We retrieve the dayside temperature ( T day = 3771 − 520 + 669 K), nightside temperature ( T night < 1649 K at 2σ), and longitudinal offset of the planet's hot spot, and quantify how they depend on the reduction and detrending. Our reanalysis suggests that 55 Cancri e has a negligible hot spot offset of − 12 − 18 + 21 degrees east. The small phase offset and cool nightside are consistent with the poor heat transport expected on ultra-short-period planets. The high dayside 4.5 μ m brightness temperature is qualitatively consistent with SiO emission from an inverted rock vapor atmosphere.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".