Detection of CO, H$_2$O, and OH in WASP-18b with JWST/NIRISS using Direct-Extracted Spectra and Cross-Correlation

Abstract

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revolutionized the characterization of exoplanetary atmospheres, offering unprecedented sensitivity to probe their chemical and physical properties. Recently, a growing trend has emerged to obtain atmospheric information directly from pixel-level planetary spectra. In this work, we re-analyzed the WASP-18b NIRISS/SOSS dataset by employing a direct extraction method. This new method preserves the spectral information at the native instrumental resolution, thereby enabling the application of cross-correlation techniques and providing atmospheric retrievals with enhanced precision and richer information content. With this methodology, we report detections of CO at $4.4σ$ significance, H$_2$O at $3.4σ$, and OH at $7.8σ$, where CO and OH were previously unseen. Building on these unambiguous detections, our subsequent retrieval analysis significantly improves the constraints on atmospheric abundances. Our results demonstrate that the cross-correlation technique effectively extracts molecular signals from medium-resolution JWST data, enhancing detection sensitivity. By revisiting JWST archival data with cross-correlation and retrieval analysis, we can achieve a more comprehensive survey of planetary atmospheric chemistry, thereby placing precise constraints on key parameters such as planetary metallicity and C/O ratio.