{"id":1062971,"date":"2026-07-02T03:57:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-02T03:57:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1062971\/"},"modified":"2026-07-02T03:57:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T03:57:10","slug":"aerosols-and-hydrocarbons-in-the-atmosphere-of-a-white-dwarf-planet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1062971\/","title":{"rendered":"Aerosols and hydrocarbons in the atmosphere of a white dwarf planet"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Data reduction<\/p>\n<p>Our PRISM observation used 33 groups across 240 integrations, with each integration lasting 29.8\u2009s, for a total observing time of 1.98\u2009h. Although the transit duration of WD\u20091856\u2009b only lasts 8\u2009min, we selected this observing window to ensure JWST captured a transit of WD\u20091856\u2009b with sufficient out-of-transit baseline for detector settling. We used two independent codes to reduce the NIRSpec PRISM observation of WD\u20091856\u2009b and extract transmission spectra: FIREFLy and Juniper. Here we detail the reduction and light curve fitting approach used by each code.<\/p>\n<p>FIREFLy<\/p>\n<p>We first reduced the WD\u20091856\u2009b data using the Fast InfraRed Exoplanet Fitting Lyghtcurve (FIREFLy)<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 13\" title=\"Rustamkulov, Z., Sing, D. K., Liu, R. &amp; Wang, A. Analysis of a JWST NIRSpec lab time series: characterizing systematics, recovering exoplanet transit spectroscopy, and constraining a noise floor. Astrophys. J. Lett. 928, L7 (2022).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR13\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e2234\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">13<\/a>,<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 29\" title=\"Rustamkulov, Z. et al. Early Release Science of the exoplanet WASP-39b with JWST NIRSpec PRISM. Nature 614, 659&#x2013;663 (2023).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR29\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e2237\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">29<\/a>,<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 30\" title=\"Sing, D. K. et al. A warm Neptune&#x2019;s methane reveals core mass and vigorous atmospheric mixing. Nature 630, 831&#x2013;835 (2024).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR30\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e2240\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">30<\/a> reduction suite. The reduction started with the uncalibrated (uncal.fits) images and a customized jwst pipeline reduction. During stages 1 and 2, the 1\/f noise was removed at the group level, using the top and bottom six rows to measure the count level for each column and subtracting the median value. The dark current step was skipped and the jump step was performed with a rejection threshold of 20. During stage 3, we then used the custom-run pipeline 2D images after the jwst.assign_wcs step and performed customized cleaning of bad pixels, cosmic rays and hot pixels. We used cross-correlation to measure the positional shift of the spectral trace across the detector and shift-stabilized the images with flux-conserving interpolation. This procedure has been found to reduce the amplitude of position-dependent systematic trends<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 13\" title=\"Rustamkulov, Z., Sing, D. K., Liu, R. &amp; Wang, A. Analysis of a JWST NIRSpec lab time series: characterizing systematics, recovering exoplanet transit spectroscopy, and constraining a noise floor. Astrophys. J. Lett. 928, L7 (2022).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR13\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e2247\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">13<\/a>,<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 29\" title=\"Rustamkulov, Z. et al. Early Release Science of the exoplanet WASP-39b with JWST NIRSpec PRISM. Nature 614, 659&#x2013;663 (2023).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR29\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e2250\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">29<\/a>. An aperture size of 5.7\u2009pixels was used to extract the spectra, with this product used to fit the transit light curves and extract the exoplanet spectra.<\/p>\n<p>During stages 4 and 5, we fit the white light curve using a linear baseline and a limb-darkened transit model<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 31\" title=\"Kreidberg, L. batman: BAsic Transit Model cAlculatioN in Python. Publ. Astron. Soc. Pac. 127, 1161&#x2013;1165 (2015).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR31\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e2257\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">31<\/a>. The stellar limb darkening was modelled with the procedures from ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 32\" title=\"Sing, D. K. Stellar limb-darkening coefficients for CoRot and Kepler. Astron. Astrophys. 510, A21 (2010).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR32\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e2261\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">32<\/a> and a quadratic function using ExoTiC-LD<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 33\" title=\"Grant, D. &amp; Wakeford, H. R. Exo-TiC\/ExoTiC-LD: ExoTiC-LD v3.0.0. Zenodo &#010;                  https:\/\/doi.org\/10.5281\/zenodo.7437681&#010;                  &#010;                 (2022).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR33\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e2265\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">33<\/a>. The values were fixed to the best-fitting theoretical host white dwarf model values (see the \u2018White dwarf host spectrum\u2019 section below). We measured the white light curve using the 0.55 to 3\u2009\u03bcm region, such that the planetary emission would not bias the transit depth and resulting system parameters. The NIRSpec PRISM spectral time series for FIREFLy is shown in Extended Data Fig.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"figure anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Fig5\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">1<\/a>). Several pre-transit exposures showed abnormally low flux levels, which we flagged as outliers and removed from the remaining analysis. These outliers seem to be because of clusters of bright\/hot pixels, so are probably associated with snowball events. We fixed the period using the results from ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 34\" title=\"Kubiak, S. et al. TTV constraints on additional planets in the WD 1856+534 system. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 521, 4679&#x2013;4694 (2023).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR34\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e2272\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">34<\/a>. The best-fit white light curve system values are given in Extended Data Table\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"table anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Tab1\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">1<\/a>. The transmission spectral light curves used 3-pixel binning and were fit with the same model, setting the system parameters to be fixed to the white light curve values.<\/p>\n<p>Juniper<\/p>\n<p>We also applied Juniper, a new custom pipeline for JWST NIRSpec observations, to reduce our WD\u20091856\u2009b data. Juniper contains a wrapper for stages 1 and 2 of the jwst pipeline with custom steps. We start our processing from Juniper stage 1 with the uncal.fits files from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). We opt to disable the jwst stage 1 jump detection step and instead handle cosmic rays through custom procedures in later stages. Before ramp fitting, group-level background subtraction is performed using the top and bottom six rows as the background region to reduce scatter in the extracted light curves. We spatially filter 3\u03c3 outliers from this region and average along columns to determine the background level of counts per column, which is subtracted from the full group. We then proceed with jwst stage 1 ramp fitting and gain scaling. Juniper stage 2 is a pure wrapper for jwst stage 2; we carry out this stage with the flat field and photom steps disabled, as neither is required to measure transit depth and we observed the former to increase the noise in the spectral extraction.<\/p>\n<p>Juniper stage 3 performs extra cleaning at the integration level. We first mask pixels flagged by the jwst pipeline for data quality issues. We then reject cosmic rays in time over two iterations, replacing 6.5\u03c3 outliers with the median value of the pixel in time. Finally, a second round of background subtraction, using the same strategy as the group-level background subtraction in stage 1, is performed using the top and bottom three rows with outliers masked at 3\u03c3.<\/p>\n<p>Stage 4 of the Juniper pipeline extracts 1D spectra, which are subsequently binned to produce light curves. Our aperture is centred on the brightest row of the trace and extends \u00b13\u2009pixels above and below it. We perform optimal extraction<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 35\" title=\"Horne, K. An optimal extraction algorithm for CCD spectroscopy. Publ. Astron. Soc. Pac. 98, 609&#x2013;617 (1986).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR35\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e2303\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">35<\/a> to extract the 1D spectrum, taking as our extraction profile the median image of the trace contained in the aperture, normalized along columns. We sum across all pixels from 0.552 to 3\u2009\u03bcm to extract a broadband light curve; we choose not to include light from wavelengths longer than 3\u2009\u03bcm as this light is strongly affected by contamination from nightside thermal emission, which affects the determined system parameters (for example, semimajor axis, transit epoch, impact parameter). We then bin every 3\u2009pixels to produce 137 median-normalized spectroscopic light curves at nearly native resolution, spanning 0.552 to 5.360\u2009\u03bcm. Our extracted broadband and spectroscopic light curves would typically be sigma-clipped to further remove outliers; however, this technique is prone to clipping out the transit itself owing to the short transit duration and large transit depth. We therefore disable this procedure and use alternative outlier rejection procedures in stage 5.<\/p>\n<p>Juniper stage 5 is the final stage of the pipeline, which fits transit models to each light curve to extract transit depth and produce a transmission spectrum. Our fitting procedure is a two-step process combining linear and nonlinear fitting techniques, which we use to clean outliers that sigma-clipping cannot safely remove. We start by using a linear least-squares estimator to fit a batman transit model<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 31\" title=\"Kreidberg, L. batman: BAsic Transit Model cAlculatioN in Python. Publ. Astron. Soc. Pac. 127, 1161&#x2013;1165 (2015).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR31\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e2310\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">31<\/a>, applying a quadratic limb-darkening law with coefficients generated with ExoTiC-LD<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 33\" title=\"Grant, D. &amp; Wakeford, H. R. Exo-TiC\/ExoTiC-LD: ExoTiC-LD v3.0.0. Zenodo &#010;                  https:\/\/doi.org\/10.5281\/zenodo.7437681&#010;                  &#010;                 (2022).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR33\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e2314\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">33<\/a> using a custom white dwarf model produced by fitting a white dwarf spectrum to the out-of-transit flux of WD\u20091856 (described below). Our model is further multiplied by a linear-in-time trend to account for visit-long ramp effects. We then compute the residuals of the fitted transit and systematics model and clip any points in the light curve that produce 3\u03c3 outliers in the residuals. We compute the standard deviation of the sigma-clipped residuals to estimate the photometric uncertainty, which we supply to the next step of our fit procedure. We refit the sigma-clipped light curve using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 36\" title=\"Foreman-Mackey, D., Hogg, D. W., Lang, D. &amp; Goodman, J. emcee: the MCMC hammer. Publ. Astron. Soc. Pac. 125, 306 (2013).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR36\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e2321\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">36<\/a> to extract our final planet\u2013star radius ratio spectrum. We first fit our 0.552 to 3\u2009\u03bcm broadband light curve using this two-step fitting process to determine the broadband depth, semimajor axis a\/R*, inclination i, mid-transit epoch tC and linear-in-time systematics model parameters, from which we derive the impact parameter b and its uncertainty. The orbit period P was held fixed to 1.407939217\u2009days based on a follow-up paper studying transit timing variations in the WD\u20091856+534 system<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 34\" title=\"Kubiak, S. et al. TTV constraints on additional planets in the WD 1856+534 system. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 521, 4679&#x2013;4694 (2023).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR34\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e2347\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">34<\/a>. Our broadband light curve analysis yielded a\/R*\u2009=\u2009339.25\u2009\u00b1\u20095.92 and b\u2009=\u20097.34\u2009\u00b1\u20090.20. We then fix these values as well as tC as determined by the broadband light curve fit for all subsequent spectroscopic light curve fits. We fit every spectroscopic light curve with our two-step process to determine Rp(\u03bb)\/R* and the linear systematics trend in every wavelength channel. Our broadband light curve fit achieves residuals of 522\u2009ppm, whereas our spectroscopic fits achieve median residuals of 8,153\u2009ppm. We present our fitted system parameters (a\/R*, b, Rp\/R*) and broadband transit depth in Extended Data Table\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"table anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Tab1\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">1<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Grazing transit spectroscopy<\/p>\n<p>The unique transit geometry of the WD\u20091856 system required us to develop a new approach to express and model transmission spectra. A transmission spectrum encodes the wavelength-dependent effective area of a planet relative to its host star. Exoplanet analyses typically take the spectroscopic planet\u2013star radius ratio from light curve fits, Rp(\u03bb)\/R*, and then express the transmission spectrum as \\({R}_{{\\rm{p}}}{(\\lambda )}^{2}\/{R}_{\\ast }^{2}\\). This quantity is equivalent to the transit depth for a planet with radius Rp(\u03bb) fully occulting a non-limb-darkened star of radius R*. However, because WD\u20091856\u2009b is seven times larger than its white dwarf host with a grazing transit, the transmission spectrum cannot be written as \\({R}_{{\\rm{p}}}{(\\lambda )}^{2}\/{R}_{\\ast }^{2}\\). Indeed, the transit depth of WD\u20091856\u2009b is dependent on time throughout the transit (see ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 11\" title=\"Xu, S. et al. Gemini\/GMOS transmission spectroscopy of the grazing planet candidate WD 1856+534 b. Astron. J. 162, 296 (2021).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR11\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e2565\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">11<\/a>), with a maximum transit depth corresponding to the time of greatest areal overlap between the planet and its host (Fig.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"figure anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Fig1\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">1<\/a>). We therefore express the transmission spectrum of WD\u20091856\u2009b as the wavelength-dependent maximum transit depth at the time of mid-transit, Ap\/A*.<\/p>\n<p>We convert the spectroscopic planet\u2013host radius ratio into the mid-transit transit depth by calculating the time-dependent area overlap of two discs. The overlapping area of two circles with radii Rp (representing the planet) and R* (representing the white dwarf), separated by a distance d, is given by: <\/p>\n<p>$${A}_{{\\rm{p}}}(d)={R}_{{\\rm{p}}}^{2}\\theta +{R}_{\\ast }^{2}\\phi -\\frac{1}{2}{R}_{{\\rm{p}}}^{2}\\sin (2\\theta )-\\frac{1}{2}{R}_{\\ast }^{2}\\sin (2\\phi )$$<\/p>\n<p>\n                    (1)\n                <\/p>\n<p>in which<\/p>\n<p>$$\\theta ={\\cos }^{-1}\\,\\left(\\frac{{d}^{2}+{R}_{{\\rm{p}}}^{2}-{R}_{\\ast }^{2}}{2d{R}_{{\\rm{p}}}}\\right)$$<\/p>\n<p>\n                    (2)\n                <\/p>\n<p>$$\\phi ={\\cos }^{-1}\\,\\left(\\frac{{d}^{2}+{R}_{\\ast }^{2}-{R}_{{\\rm{p}}}^{2}}{2d{R}_{\\ast }}\\right)$$<\/p>\n<p>\n                    (3)\n                <\/p>\n<p>Considering the time of mid-transit (when d\u2009=\u2009bR*, in which b is the transit impact parameter), we can express the maximum transit depth as: <\/p>\n<p>$$\\frac{{A}_{{\\rm{p}}}}{{A}_{\\ast }}=\\frac{1}{{\\rm{\\pi }}}\\left[{\\left(\\frac{{R}_{{\\rm{p}}}}{{R}_{\\ast }}\\right)}^{2}\\left(\\theta -\\frac{1}{2}\\sin 2\\theta \\right)+\\left(\\phi -\\frac{1}{2}\\sin 2\\phi \\right)\\right]$$<\/p>\n<p>\n                    (4)\n                <\/p>\n<p>in which<\/p>\n<p>$$\\theta ={\\cos }^{-1}\\,\\left[\\frac{{b}^{2}+{\\left(\\frac{{R}_{{\\rm{p}}}}{{R}_{\\ast }}\\right)}^{2}-1}{2b\\left(\\frac{{R}_{{\\rm{p}}}}{{R}_{\\ast }}\\right)}\\right]$$<\/p>\n<p>\n                    (5)\n                <\/p>\n<p>$$\\phi ={\\cos }^{-1}\\,\\left[\\frac{{b}^{2}-{\\left(\\frac{{R}_{{\\rm{p}}}}{{R}_{\\ast }}\\right)}^{2}+1}{2b}\\right]$$<\/p>\n<p>\n                    (6)\n                <\/p>\n<p>We use equations\u2009(<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"equation anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Equ4\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">4<\/a>), (<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"equation anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Equ5\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">5<\/a>) and (<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"equation anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Equ6\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">6<\/a>) to map the spectroscopic radius ratio, Rp\/R*, and impact parameter from the spectroscopic light curve fits of each data reduction into the equivalent mid-transit transmission spectrum. We use the uncertainties Python package to propagate errors using these formulae. This approach automatically removes offsets between the different reductions for Rp\/R*, as each corresponding pair of Rp\/R* and b must yield consistent Ap\/A* to have the same transit shape (that is, to match Fig.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"figure anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Fig1\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">1<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>We show our final transmission spectra of WD\u20091856\u2009b, expressed as the mid-transit transmission spectrum (Ap\/A*), in Extended Data Fig.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"figure anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Fig6\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">2<\/a>. Both reductions clearly detect the strong signature of nightside contamination (the slope to lower transit depths at longer wavelengths) and lead to consistent atmospheric inferences from our retrieval analysis (see the \u2018Atmospheric retrieval analysis\u2019 section). We note that the two reductions partially deviate at wavelengths longer than 5\u2009\u03bcm\u2014mainly because of differences in the light-darkening treatments and uncertainties in the red edge detector behaviour\u2014so we restricted our atmospheric analysis for WD\u20091856\u2009b to the NIRSpec PRISM data from 0.5\u20135\u2009\u03bcm.<\/p>\n<p>White dwarf host spectrum<\/p>\n<p>We extracted a calibrated out-of-transit NIRSpec PRISM stellar spectrum for WD\u20091856 using the FIREFLy data reduction. Starting from the cleaned 2D images, we further flat-fielded, flux-calibrated and extracted the resulting host spectrum. The resulting stellar spectra are shown in Extended Data Fig.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"figure anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Fig7\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">3<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>We determined the atmospheric parameters of the host white dwarf by fitting the out-of-transit system flux. We minimized the \u03c72 for a model suitable for cool white dwarfs<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 14\" title=\"Blouin, S., Dufour, P. &amp; Allard, N. F. A new generation of cool white dwarf atmosphere models. I. Theoretical framework and applications to DZ stars. Astrophys. J. 863, 184 (2018).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR14\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e3656\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">14<\/a> defined by three parameters: the effective temperature of the white dwarf, Teff, its photospheric hydrogen-to-helium abundance ratio and the solid angle \u03c0R*2\/D2. Because the distance D is known from the Gaia DR3 parallax, the solid angle directly constrains the radius of the white dwarf. The radius, in turn, determines the mass and surface gravity of the white dwarf given theoretical white dwarf structure models<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 37\" title=\"B&#xE9;dard, A., Bergeron, P., Brassard, P. &amp; Fontaine, G. On the spectral evolution of hot white dwarf stars. I. A detailed model atmosphere analysis of hot white dwarfs from SDSS DR12. Astrophys. J. 901, 93 (2020).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR37\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e3677\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">37<\/a>. The best-fit solution (Extended Data Fig.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"figure anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Fig7\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">3<\/a>) corresponds to Teff\u2009=\u20094,920\u2009K, logg\u2009=\u20098.05 and NH\/NHe\u2009=\u20094.1. This solution yields an H\u03b1 line that extends 2% below the continuum, which is consistent with previously obtained optical spectroscopy<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 11\" title=\"Xu, S. et al. Gemini\/GMOS transmission spectroscopy of the grazing planet candidate WD 1856+534 b. Astron. J. 162, 296 (2021).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR11\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e3704\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">11<\/a> (not considered here in our fit). We also attempted to fit the PRISM spectrum using pure-hydrogen models (that is, without considering NH\/NHe as a free parameter), but the best-fit solution yields a much worse fit to the PRISM data than the mixed H and He atmosphere solution. We calculated limb-darkening coefficients for the best-fitting white dwarf model (using the approach from ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 38\" title=\"Gianninas, A., Strickland, B. D., Kilic, M. &amp; Bergeron, P. Limb-darkening coefficients for eclipsing white dwarfs. Astrophys. J. 766, 3 (2013).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR38\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e3716\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">38<\/a>), which we then fixed during the WD\u20091856\u2009b spectroscopic light curve fits for our two data reductions.<\/p>\n<p>Transmission spectrum modelling<\/p>\n<p>The grazing transit geometry of WD\u20091856\u2009b, coupled with the clear presence of planetary nightside thermal emission, requires a new modelling approach. The transmission spectrum for a planet with a grazing transit and nightside thermal emission can be written as<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 39\" title=\"MacDonald, R. J. &amp; Lewis, N. K. TRIDENT: a rapid 3D radiative-transfer model for exoplanet transmission spectra. Astrophys. J. 929, 20 (2022).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR39\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e3728\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">39<\/a>: <\/p>\n<p>$${\\varDelta }_{\\lambda }=\\frac{{A}_{{\\rm{p}}({\\rm{t}}{\\rm{o}}{\\rm{p}})}-{\\int }_{{A}_{{\\rm{p}}}}{{\\mathcal{T}}}_{\\lambda }{\\rm{d}}A}{{\\rm{\\pi }}{R}_{\\ast }^{2}}\\left(\\frac{1}{1+\\frac{{F}_{{\\rm{p}}({\\rm{n}}{\\rm{i}}{\\rm{g}}{\\rm{h}}{\\rm{t}}),\\lambda }}{{F}_{\\ast ,\\lambda }}}\\right)$$<\/p>\n<p>\n                    (7)\n                <\/p>\n<p>in which Ap(top) is the area of the planet overlapping the star at the top of the modelled atmosphere (given by equation\u2009(<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"equation anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Equ1\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">1<\/a>) with Rp\u2009=\u2009Rp,top), \\({{\\mathcal{T}}}_{\\lambda }\\) is the atmospheric transmissivity (\\({{\\rm{e}}}^{-{\\tau }_{\\lambda }}\\), in which \u03c4\u03bb is the slant optical depth) in the area element dA and Fp(night),\u03bb and F*,\u03bb are the observed fluxes from the planetary nightside and white dwarf at Earth, respectively. We reduce the area integral in the first term to a single integral over the fractional annuli of the planet overlapping the star (that is, dA\u2009=\u2009Ap(ri,up)\u2009\u2212\u2009Ap(ri,low), in which we use the radii of the upper and lower boundaries of each atmospheric layer in place of Rp in equation\u2009(<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"equation anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Equ1\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">1<\/a>)). The first term in equation\u2009(<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"equation anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Equ7\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">7<\/a>) represents the wavelength-dependent effective area of the fraction of the planet overlapping the white dwarf, relative to the projected disk area of the white dwarf. The second term accounts for the \u2018nightside pollution\u2019\/dilution of the transit depth<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 17\" title=\"Kipping, D. M. &amp; Tinetti, G. Nightside pollution of exoplanet transit depths. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 407, 2589&#x2013;2598 (2010).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR17\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e4130\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">17<\/a> owing to thermal emission from the planetary hemisphere facing the observer.<\/p>\n<p>Transmission spectra of WD\u20091856\u2009b can also be expressed in terms of emergent fluxes by using the solid angle relation between the observed flux and the emergent (surface) flux, such that equation\u2009(<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"equation anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Equ7\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">7<\/a>) becomes: <\/p>\n<p>$${\\varDelta }_{\\lambda }=\\frac{{A}_{{\\rm{p}}({\\rm{t}}{\\rm{o}}{\\rm{p}})}-{\\int }_{{A}_{{\\rm{p}}}}{{\\mathcal{T}}}_{\\lambda }{\\rm{d}}A}{{\\rm{\\pi }}{R}_{\\ast }^{2}}\\times \\left(\\frac{1}{1+\\frac{{R}_{{\\rm{p}},({\\rm{n}}{\\rm{i}}{\\rm{g}}{\\rm{h}}{\\rm{t}}),\\lambda }^{2}}{{R}_{\\ast }^{2}}\\frac{{F}_{{\\rm{p}}({\\rm{n}}{\\rm{i}}{\\rm{g}}{\\rm{h}}{\\rm{t}}),{\\rm{s}}{\\rm{u}}{\\rm{r}}{\\rm{f}},\\lambda }}{{F}_{\\ast ,{\\rm{s}}{\\rm{u}}{\\rm{r}}{\\rm{f}},\\lambda }}}\\right)$$<\/p>\n<p>\n                    (8)\n                <\/p>\n<p>in which Rp,(night),\u03bb is the radius of the emitting thermal photosphere on the nightside (nominally the \u03c4v,\u03bb\u2009=\u20092\/3 pressure level, in which \u03c4v,\u03bb is the vertical optical depth integrated downwards from the top of the atmosphere). The planet\u2013star surface flux ratio featured in equation\u2009(<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"equation anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Equ8\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">8<\/a>) is a standard output from radiative transfer codes used to calculate exoplanet emission spectra. Similarly, the transmissivity, \\({{\\mathcal{T}}}_{\\lambda }\\), is already calculated by radiative transfer codes calculating standard transmission spectra. Therefore, to calculate the transmission spectra of WD\u20091856\u2009b, we can construct a model atmosphere and then calculate both the transmissivity from the slant optical depth and the emergent planet\u2013host flux ratio. The observed transmission spectrum then represents a product between a grazing transit transmission spectrum and an \u2018upside-down\u2019 emission spectrum.<\/p>\n<p>Atmospheric retrieval analysis<\/p>\n<p>We infer the atmospheric properties of WD\u20091856\u2009b using the open-source Bayesian atmospheric retrieval code POSEIDON<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 15\" title=\"MacDonald, R. J. &amp; Madhusudhan, N. HD 209458b in new light: evidence of nitrogen chemistry, patchy clouds and sub-solar water. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 469, 1979&#x2013;1996 (2017).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR15\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e4588\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">15<\/a>,<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 16\" title=\"MacDonald, R. J. POSEIDON: a multidimensional atmospheric retrieval code for exoplanet spectra. J. Open Source Softw. 8, 4873 (2023).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR16\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e4591\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">16<\/a>. We model the atmosphere of WD\u20091856\u2009b using 100 layers spaced uniformly in log-pressure from 10\u22127 to 100\u2009bar. We assume that the atmosphere is well mixed, with consistent atmospheric properties at the day\u2013night terminator and at the nightside, such that only a single set of parameters describe the atmospheric state. We fit for the planetary radius at the 10\u2009bar pressure level and the planetary mass, while fixing the white dwarf radius to R*\u2009=\u20090.0131\u2009RSun and the transit impact parameter to 7.430234 (as the impact parameter uncertainty is already marginalized into the Rp\/R* uncertainties, it does not need to be an independent free parameter). We include the log10 mixing ratios of the following molecules as free parameters: CH4, NH3, H2O, CO2, CO, HCN, C2H2, C2H4, C2H6, H2S and PH3. The remainder of the atmosphere is composed of H2 and He with an abundance ratio of He\/H2\u2009=\u20090.17, consistent with the giant planets in the Solar System<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 40\" title=\"Atreya, S. K. et al. Deep atmosphere composition, structure, origin, and exploration, with particular focus on critical in situ science at the icy giants. Space Sci. Rev. 216, 18 (2020).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR40\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e4647\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">40<\/a>. We parameterize the temperature profile of WD\u20091856\u2009b using an adaptation of a prescription used for brown dwarfs<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 41\" title=\"Piette, A. A. A. &amp; Madhusudhan, N. Considerations for atmospheric retrieval of high-precision brown dwarf spectra. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 497, 5136&#x2013;5154 (2020).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR41\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e4651\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">41<\/a>. This prescription retrieves the temperature at nine pressure nodes (spaced uniformly per decade in pressure from 10\u22126 to 100\u2009bar) and interpolates between them with a spline. The nine free parameters defining this temperature profile are the 100\u2009mbar temperature and eight \u0394Ti parameters encoding the temperature difference between each pair of nodes. Given the low external irradiation of WD\u20091856\u2009b, we restrict \u0394Ti\u2009&gt;\u20090 to consider physically plausible profiles with temperature monotonically increasing with pressure. Finally, we fit for a three-parameter aerosol model consisting of a power law scattering slope (with exponent \u03b3) and an optically thick cloud-top pressure<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 15\" title=\"MacDonald, R. J. &amp; Madhusudhan, N. HD 209458b in new light: evidence of nitrogen chemistry, patchy clouds and sub-solar water. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 469, 1979&#x2013;1996 (2017).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR15\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e4674\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">15<\/a>. We do not consider inhomogenous clouds around the terminator, as only a small fraction of the terminator of WD\u20091856\u2009b occults the surface of the white dwarf during transit.<\/p>\n<p>Our retrieval model is thus defined by 25 free parameters, which we fit using MultiNest\u2019s<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" title=\"Feroz, F. &amp; Hobson, M. P. Multimodal nested sampling: an efficient and robust alternative to Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods for astronomical data analyses. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 384, 449&#x2013;463 (2008).\" href=\"#ref-CR42\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e4681\">42<\/a>,<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" title=\"Feroz, F., Hobson, M. P. &amp; Bridges, M. MULTINEST: an efficient and robust Bayesian inference tool for cosmology and particle physics. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 398, 1601&#x2013;1614 (2009).\" href=\"#ref-CR43\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e4681_1\">43<\/a>,<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 44\" title=\"Feroz, F., Hobson, M. P., Cameron, E. &amp; Pettitt, A. N. Importance nested sampling and the MultiNest algorithm. Open J. Astrophys. 2, 10 (2019).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR44\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e4684\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">44<\/a> Python wrapper PyMultiNest<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 45\" title=\"Buchner, J. et al. X-ray spectral modelling of the AGN obscuring region in the CDFS: Bayesian model selection and catalogue. Astron. Astrophys. 564, A125 (2014).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR45\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e4688\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">45<\/a> with 1,000 live points. The priors for each parameter are summarized in Extended Data Table\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"table anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Tab2\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">2<\/a>. We calculate Bayes factors (that is, odds ratios; \\({\\mathcal{B}}\\)) using Bayesian model comparisons between nested retrieval models, with the retrieval model statistics summarized in Extended Data Table\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"table anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Tab3\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">3<\/a>. For consistency with the exoplanet literature, we also convert the Bayes factor between two nested models (for example, our reference model and a model excluding CH4) into an \u2018equivalent detection significance\u2019, N\u03c3, using a standard relation<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 46\" title=\"Benneke, B. &amp; Seager, S. How to distinguish between cloudy mini-Neptunes and water\/volatile-dominated super-Earths. Astrophys. J. 778, 153 (2013).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR46\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e4725\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">46<\/a>. We note, however, that there are several caveats associated with the Bayes factor to detection significance mapping, so our preferred statistic for model preference is the Bayes factor\/odds ratio (see ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 47\" title=\"Kipping, D. &amp; Benneke, B. Exoplaneteers keep overestimating sigma significances. Preprint at &#010;                  https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2506.05392&#010;                  &#010;                 (2025).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR47\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e4729\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">47<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>We calculate model transmission spectra of WD\u20091856\u2009b by solving equation\u2009(<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"equation anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Equ8\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">8<\/a>) on a wavelength grid ranging from 0.5 to 5.6\u2009\u03bcm at R\u2009=\u200920,000. We sample high-resolution pre-computed cross-sections<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 39\" title=\"MacDonald, R. J. &amp; Lewis, N. K. TRIDENT: a rapid 3D radiative-transfer model for exoplanet transmission spectra. Astrophys. J. 929, 20 (2022).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR39\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e4742\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">39<\/a> onto this wavelength grid, using the following line list sources: CH4 (ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 48\" title=\"Yurchenko, S. N., Owens, A., Kefala, K. &amp; Tennyson, J. ExoMol line lists &#x2013; LVII. High accuracy ro-vibrational line list for methane (CH4). Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 528, 3719&#x2013;3729 (2024).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR48\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e4748\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">48<\/a>), NH3 (ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 49\" title=\"Coles, P. A., Yurchenko, S. N. &amp; Tennyson, J. ExoMol molecular line lists &#x2013; XXXV. A rotation-vibration line list for hot ammonia. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 490, 4638&#x2013;4647 (2019).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR49\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e4755\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">49<\/a>), H2O (ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 50\" title=\"Polyansky, O. L. et al. ExoMol molecular line lists XXX: a complete high-accuracy line list for water. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 480, 2597&#x2013;2608 (2018).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR50\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e4761\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">50<\/a>), CO2 (ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 51\" title=\"Yurchenko, S. N., Mellor, T. M., Freedman, R. S. &amp; Tennyson, J. ExoMol line lists &#x2013; XXXIX. Ro-vibrational molecular line list for CO2. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 496, 5282&#x2013;5291 (2020).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR51\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e4767\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">51<\/a>), CO (ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 52\" title=\"Li, G. et al. Rovibrational line lists for nine isotopologues of the CO molecule in the X1&#x3A3;+ ground electronic state. Astrophys. J. Suppl. Ser. 216, 15 (2015).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR52\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e4772\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">52<\/a>), HCN (ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 53\" title=\"Barber, R. J. et al. ExoMol line lists &#x2013; III. An improved hot rotation-vibration line list for HCN and HNC. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 437, 1828&#x2013;1835 (2014).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR53\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e4776\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">53<\/a>), C2H2 (ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 54\" title=\"Chubb, K. L., Tennyson, J. &amp; Yurchenko, S. N. ExoMol molecular line lists &#x2013; XXXVII. Spectra of acetylene. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 493, 1531&#x2013;1545 (2020).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR54\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e4784\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">54<\/a>), C2H4 (ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 55\" title=\"Gordon, I. E. et al. The HITRAN2020 molecular spectroscopic database. J. Quant. Spectrosc. Radiat. Transfer 277, 107949 (2022).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR55\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e4793\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">55<\/a>), C2H6 (ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 55\" title=\"Gordon, I. E. et al. The HITRAN2020 molecular spectroscopic database. J. Quant. Spectrosc. Radiat. Transfer 277, 107949 (2022).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR55\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e4801\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">55<\/a>), H2S (ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 56\" title=\"Azzam, A. A. A., Tennyson, J., Yurchenko, S. N. &amp; Naumenko, O. V. ExoMol molecular line lists &#x2013; XVI. The rotation&#x2013;vibration spectrum of hot H2S. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 460, 4063&#x2013;4074 (2016).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR56\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e4808\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">56<\/a>) and PH3 (ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 57\" title=\"Sousa-Silva, C., Al-Refaie, A. F., Tennyson, J. &amp; Yurchenko, S. N. ExoMol line lists &#x2013; VII. The rotation&#x2013;vibration spectrum of phosphine up to 1500 K. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 446, 2337&#x2013;2347 (2015).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR57\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e4814\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">57<\/a>). We also include continuum opacity from H2 and He collision-induced absorption<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 58\" title=\"Karman, T. et al. Update of the HITRAN collision-induced absorption section. Icarus 328, 160&#x2013;175 (2019).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR58\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e4820\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">58<\/a> and Rayleigh scattering. For the host flux, we use the best-fit white dwarf model shown in Extended Data Fig.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"figure anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Fig7\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">3<\/a>. Our model transmission spectra are finally convolved with the NIRSpec PRISM point spread function and binned down to the resolution of the observations to calculate the likelihood of each location in the retrieval model parameter space.<\/p>\n<p>Although Fig.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"figure anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Fig3\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">3<\/a> compares several retrieved atmospheric properties between the FIREFLy and Juniper data reductions, we provide the full posterior distributions in Extended Data Fig.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"figure anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Fig8\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">4<\/a>. We find excellent agreement between FIREFLy and Juniper for all retrieved parameters.<\/p>\n<p>To interpret the thermal history of WD\u20091856\u2009b, we also calculate posterior distributions for the planetary effective temperature from our retrieval results. We calculated the emergent planetary surface flux of WD\u20091856\u2009b for each atmosphere in the full set of posterior samples from both the FIREFLy and Juniper reductions on a wavelength grid from 1 to 50\u2009\u03bcm. For each set of atmospheric parameters, we calculate the corresponding effective temperature using the Stefan\u2013Boltzmann law: \\({T}_{{\\rm{eff}}}={\\left(\\frac{1}{{\\sigma }_{{\\rm{SB}}}}\\int {F}_{{\\rm{p}},{\\rm{surf}},\\lambda }{\\rm{d}}\\lambda \\right)}^{1\/4}\\). Extended Data Fig.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"figure anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Fig9\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">5<\/a> shows our retrieved surface flux spectrum for WD\u20091856\u2009b for both data reductions and the corresponding Teff posterior distributions. Using the lowest 1\u03c3 credible interval (from FIREFLy) and the highest 1\u03c3 credible interval (from Juniper), we find a range of 390\u2013412\u2009K for Teff. We similarly report the 1\u03c3 range encompassing both data reductions for Mp in the main text. The roughly 10\u2009K 1\u03c3 uncertainty on Teff is driven by the numerous CH4 bands detected in our NIRSpec PRISM data setting the relative amplitude of other CH4 features at longer wavelengths. However, the potential presence of other hydrocarbons, such as C2H6, allows a larger surface flux uncertainty in which these species absorb in the mid-infrared (for example, 10\u201315\u2009\u03bcm), which increases the uncertainty in the integrated power and hence Teff. Longer wavelength observations of WD\u20091856\u2009b with MIRI LRS\/MRS, such as those planned in JWST Cycle 4 (GO-9033 and GO-9157), will constrain Teff even further.<\/p>\n<p>Mie scattering retrievals<\/p>\n<p>We have established that models including aerosol opacity are required to explain the transmission spectrum of WD\u20091856\u2009b. Specifically, our free retrieval analysis above infers an opaque cloud deck near 100\u2009mbar and a haze to explain the power-law scattering slope shortwards of 1\u2009\u03bcm. The enhanced scattering slope indicates a collection of small particles in the upper atmosphere, but our parametric description is agnostic to the specific aerosol composition. Here we consider retrievals including Mie scattering to investigate which specific aerosol species are consistent with the transmission spectrum of WD\u20091856\u2009b.<\/p>\n<p>The composition of small, Mie scattering particles can be potentially identified by means of aerosol absorption features at infrared wavelengths, whereas their particle size is encoded by the scattering slope. We assess here which aerosol species and particle sizes can explain the observed scattering slope by means of retrievals including compositionally specific Mie scattering aerosols. We do not test directly for specific species causing the opaque cloud deck, as this deck is probably composed of large particles with muted resonance features<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 59\" title=\"Marley, M. S., Gelino, C., Stephens, D., Lunine, J. I. &amp; Freedman, R. Reflected spectra and albedos of extrasolar giant planets. I. Clear and cloudy atmospheres. Astrophys. J. 513, 879&#x2013;893 (1999).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR59\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5027\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">59<\/a>,<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 60\" title=\"Min, M., Dominik, C. &amp; Waters, L. B. F. M. Spectroscopic diagnostic for the mineralogy of large dust grains. Astron. Astrophys. 413, L35&#x2013;L38 (2004).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR60\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5030\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">60<\/a>. Because such a condensate cloud deck has no spectroscopic features, it is not possible to determine the composition unless condensates are lofted above the deck and become smaller in size.<\/p>\n<p>We use the Mie scattering retrieval module and database introduced in POSEIDON v1.2 (ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 61\" title=\"Mullens, E., Lewis, N. K. &amp; MacDonald, R. J. Implementation of aerosol Mie scattering in POSEIDON with application to the hot Jupiter HD 189733 b&#x2019;s transmission, emission, and reflected light spectrum. Astrophys. J. 977, 105 (2024).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR61\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5037\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">61<\/a>). Our Mie scattering retrievals use aerosol extinction cross-sections pre-computed from refractive indices. We mainly consider a simple aerosol model parameterized by the log10 mean particle size (logrm \\({\\mathcal{U}}\\,[-3,1]\\)) and aerosol log10 volume mixing ratio (log aerosol \\({\\mathcal{U}}\\,[-30,-1]\\))\u2014representing a well-mixed aerosol uniformly distributed within the atmosphere. We also tested more complex aerosol models that fit for pressure-dependent aerosol mixing ratios but these all reduced to a pressure-independent model. Our Mie retrievals use a six-parameter pressure\u2013temperature (P\u2013T) profile<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 62\" title=\"Madhusudhan, N. &amp; Seager, S. A temperature and abundance retrieval method for exoplanet atmospheres. Astrophys. J. 707, 24&#x2013;39 (2009).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR62\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5130\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">62<\/a>. We conduct these Mie retrievals on the FIREFLy data reduction.<\/p>\n<p>We ran retrievals with a suite of aerosol species representing three different aerosol formation regimes that could be relevant in upper atmosphere of WD\u20091856\u2009b. The first aerosol regime represents disequilibrium hazes and soot species that can be produced by photochemistry: Titan tholins (tholins<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 63\" title=\"Khare, B. N. et al. Optical constants of organic tholins produced in a simulated Titanian atmosphere: from soft X-ray to microwave frequencies. Icarus 60, 127&#x2013;137 (1984).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR63\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5137\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">63<\/a>,<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 64\" title=\"Ramirez, S. I. et al. Complex refractive index of Titan&#x2019;s aerosol analogues in the 200&#x2013;900 nm domain. Icarus 156, 515&#x2013;529 (2002).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR64\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5140\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">64<\/a>), carbon soot (C (ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 65\" title=\"Draine, B. T. Scattering by interstellar dust grains. I. Optical and ultraviolet. Astrophys. J. 598, 1017&#x2013;1025 (2003).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR65\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5144\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">65<\/a>)), water-rich organic haze at two temperatures (ExoHaze 300K, ExoHaze 400K (ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 66\" title=\"He, C. et al. Optical properties of organic haze analogues in water-rich exoplanet atmospheres observable with JWST. Nat. Astron. 8, 182&#x2013;192 (2023).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR66\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5148\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">66<\/a>)) and hexene (C6H12 (ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 67\" title=\"Anderson, M. R. Determination of infrared optical constants for single component hydrocarbon fuels. &#010;                  https:\/\/api.semanticscholar.org\/CorpusID:94157827&#010;                  &#010;                 (2000).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR67\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5157\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">67<\/a>)). The second aerosol regime represents the myriad of sulfide and chloride clouds that form in brown dwarfs at the T\u2013Y transition (400\u20131,300\u2009K)<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 27\" title=\"Morley, C. V. et al. Neglected clouds in T and Y dwarf atmospheres. Astrophys. J. 756, 172 (2012).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR27\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5161\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">27<\/a> alongside Cr: chromium (Cr; Lynch and Hunter in ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 68\" title=\"Palik, E. D. Handbook of Optical Constants of Solids II (Academic Press, 1991).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR68\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5165\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">68<\/a>), magnesium sulfide (MnS (ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 69\" title=\"Huffman, D. R. &amp; Wild, R. L. Optical properties of &#x3B1;&#x2212;MnS. Phys. Rev. 156, 989&#x2013;997 (1967).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR69\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5169\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">69<\/a>)), sodium sulfide (Na2S (ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 27\" title=\"Morley, C. V. et al. Neglected clouds in T and Y dwarf atmospheres. Astrophys. J. 756, 172 (2012).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR27\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5175\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">27<\/a>)), zinc sulfide (ZnS (ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 70\" title=\"Querry, M. R. Optical constants of minerals and other materials from the millimeter to the ultraviolet. &#010;                  https:\/\/api.semanticscholar.org\/CorpusID:92855735&#010;                  &#010;                 (1987).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR70\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5180\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">70<\/a>)) and potassium chloride (KCL; Palik and Addamiano in ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 71\" title=\"Palik, E. D. Handbook of Optical Constants of Solids Vol. 3 (Academic Press, 1998).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR71\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5184\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">71<\/a>) (ordered by condensation temperature). The third aerosol regime consists of condensed ices that form deep cloud decks in Solar System planets and potentially cooler Y dwarfs (\u2264400\u2009K)<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 72\" title=\"Morley, C. V. et al. Water clouds in Y dwarfs and exoplanets. Astrophys. J. 787, 78 (2014).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR72\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5188\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">72<\/a>,<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 73\" title=\"Mang, J. et al. Microphysics of water clouds in the atmospheres of Y dwarfs and temperate giant planets. Astrophys. J. 927, 184 (2022).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR73\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5191\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">73<\/a>. These ices could cause the opaque cloud deck found in our retrievals above, which are then lofted to higher atmospheric pressures to cause the observed scattering slope, or they could condense in situ in the colder upper atmosphere: water ice (H2O (ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 74\" title=\"Warren, S. G. Optical constants of ice from the ultraviolet to the microwave. Appl. Opt. 23, 1206&#x2013;1225 (1984).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR74\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5197\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">74<\/a>)), ammonia ice (NH3 (ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 75\" title=\"Martonchik, J. V., Orton, G. S. &amp; Appleby, J. F. Optical properties of NH3 ice from the far infrared to the near ultraviolet. Appl. Opt. 23, 541&#x2013;547 (1984).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR75\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5204\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">75<\/a>)) and methane ice (CH4 (ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 76\" title=\"Martonchik, J. &amp; Orton, G. Optical constants of liquid and solid methane. Appl. Opt. 33, 8306&#x2013;17 (1994).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR76\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5210\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">76<\/a>)) (ordered by condensation temperature).<\/p>\n<p>We find that all aerosol species, with the exception of MnS and hexene, provide good fits to the scattering slope and only imprint weak absorption features into the transmission spectrum. Using Bayesian model comparisons, the best-fit haze and soot species is the water-rich organic ExoHaze (the 400K variant), the best-fit T\u2013Y dwarf cloud species is KCl and the best-fit ice is NH3. Of these three aerosols, KCl has the highest Bayesian evidence. The potential presence of KCl would be consistent with expectations for cold T\u2013Y dwarf models<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 27\" title=\"Morley, C. V. et al. Neglected clouds in T and Y dwarf atmospheres. Astrophys. J. 756, 172 (2012).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR27\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5220\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">27<\/a>, in which KCl forms the highest, low-density cloud. However, we note that a simple grey cloud deck\u2009+\u2009haze model (as used in the main text) is preferred over KCl by about 2\u03c3. Therefore, the present data for WD\u20091856\u2009b is not sufficiently precise to identify a clear preference for which specific aerosols are present in the atmosphere of WD\u20091856\u2009b.<\/p>\n<p>Our Mie scattering retrievals provide insights into the range of particle sizes and abundances compatible with the short wavelength scattering slope WD\u20091856\u2009b (Extended Data Fig.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"figure anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Fig10\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">6<\/a>). The ExoHaze and NH3 ice models favour a collection of small particles (about 0.03\u2009\u03bcm) with low mixing ratios (about 10\u221214), whereas the KCl model favours even smaller particles (roughly 0.01\u2009\u03bcm) with a higher abundance (about 10\u22128). Compared with our default grey cloud deck\u2009+\u2009haze retrieval model, we find consistent results for other model parameters to within 1\u03c3. In particular, we show that the retrieved planetary mass is not sensitive to the assumed aerosol model. We do find roughly 1\u2009dex lower median CH4 abundances for the Mie scattering retrievals and hence a lower C\/H ratio, but the CH4 abundance distribution is still consistent with our results in the main text. We note that the marginal evidence of C2H6 strengthens when including Mie scattering compared with the deck\u2009+\u2009haze model (Extended Data Fig.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"figure anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Fig10\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">6<\/a>) but this molecule is not strongly detected with the present data.<\/p>\n<p>Our retrieved temperature structure from the Mie scattering retrievals also indicates an atmosphere that is much warmer than the equilibrium temperature of WD\u20091856\u2009b (Extended Data Fig.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"figure anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Fig10\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">6<\/a>). As with our grey cloud and haze retrieval, we also find a temperature of about 400\u2009K in the thermal photosphere near 10\u2013100\u2009mbar. However, because the Mie scattering retrievals cannot produce an optically thick cloud deck at the pressures required to obscure thermal emission from the deep atmosphere (approximately 10\u22121.5\u2009bar), the Mie retrievals compensate by making the P\u2013T profile essentially isothermal in the deep atmosphere (that is, the retrieved P\u2013T profile shown in Fig.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"figure anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Fig2\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">2<\/a> is more physical). We note that our uniform aerosol Mie scattering retrievals are incompatible with the P\u2013T profile used in the main text<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 41\" title=\"Piette, A. A. A. &amp; Madhusudhan, N. Considerations for atmospheric retrieval of high-precision brown dwarf spectra. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 497, 5136&#x2013;5154 (2020).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR41\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5284\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">41<\/a>, as a collection of small aerosols are not able to simultaneously block the deep adiabatic thermal flux and fit the scattering slope. The P\u2013T profile parameterization chosen here<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 62\" title=\"Madhusudhan, N. &amp; Seager, S. A temperature and abundance retrieval method for exoplanet atmospheres. Astrophys. J. 707, 24&#x2013;39 (2009).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR62\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5295\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">62<\/a> tends to favour a nearly isothermal upper atmosphere, which suffices for the exploration of the aerosol properties consistent with the scattering slope of WD\u20091856\u2009b. Future explorations of the cloud structure and radiative properties of WD\u20091856\u2009b, such as composite cloud models with multiple scattering, are a rich area to deepen our understanding of the atmosphere of WD\u20091856\u2009b.<\/p>\n<p>Evolution of the WD\u20091856 systemHost progenitor and white dwarf<\/p>\n<p>We examined the evolution of the progenitor star of WD\u20091856 by consulting the MIST evolutionary models<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 77\" title=\"Choi, J. et al. MESA Isochrones and Stellar Tracks (MIST). I. Solar-scaled models. Astrophys. J. 823, 102 (2016).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR77\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5312\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">77<\/a> for non-rotating solar-metallicity stars in the appropriate mass range (\\({M}_{{\\rm{progenitor}}}=1.3{6}_{-0.18}^{+0.29}\\,{M}_{{\\rm{Sun}}}\\)). From these models, we extracted fiducial estimates of the main sequence lifetime (\\({4}_{-1.8}^{+2.4}\\,{\\rm{Gyr}}\\)) using an initial\u2013final mass relation<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 78\" title=\"Cummings, J. D., Kalirai, J. S., Tremblay, P. E., Ramirez-Ruiz, E. &amp; Choi, J. The white dwarf initial&#x2013;final mass relation for progenitor stars from 0.85 to 7.5 M&#x2299;. Astrophys. J. 866, 21 (2018).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR78\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5428\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">78<\/a>,<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 79\" title=\"Kiman, R. et al. wdwarfdate: a Python package to derive Bayesian ages of white dwarfs. Astron. J. 164, 62 (2022).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR79\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5431\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">79<\/a>, the duration of the thermally pulsing AGB stage (\\(1.5{5}_{-0.10}^{+0.26}\\,{\\rm{Myr}}\\)) and the post-AGB\/pre-white-dwarf stage (\\(0.03{4}_{-0.002}^{+0.053}\\,{\\rm{Myr}}\\)). The latter is defined here as the elapsed time between the final thermal pulse and the cooling of the exposed core to an effective temperature of 100,000\u2009K. This yields a total system age of \\(9.{4}_{-1.9}^{+2.5}\\,{\\rm{Gyr}}\\).<\/p>\n<p>We calculated the cooling age of the white dwarf host by evolving MESA white dwarf models of the appropriate mass down to Teff\u2009=\u20094,920\u2009K. We used MESA r23.05.1 (ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 80\" title=\"Bauer, E. B. Carbon&#x2013;oxygen phase separation in Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA) white dwarf models. Astrophys. J. 950, 115 (2023).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR80\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5581\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">80<\/a>). This MESA release now includes carbon\u2013oxygen fractionation<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 81\" title=\"Blouin, S. &amp; Daligault, J. Direct evaluation of the phase diagrams of dense multicomponent plasmas by integration of the Clapeyron equations. Phys. Rev. E 103, 043204 (2021).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR81\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5585\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">81<\/a>, which is important here as the white dwarf is in the process of crystallizing. A standard helium layer of \\(\\log {M}_{{\\rm{He}}}\/{M}_{* }=-2\\) was assumed, whereas a relatively thin hydrogen layer of \\(\\log {M}_{{\\rm{H}}}\/{M}_{* }=-6\\) was used. This is much thinner than the canonical value of \\(\\log {M}_{{\\rm{H}}}\/{M}_{* }=-4\\) (ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 82\" title=\"Renedo, I. et al. New cooling sequences for old white dwarfs. Astrophys. J. 717, 183&#x2013;195 (2010).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR82\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5737\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">82<\/a>) but is motivated by the fact that the model atmosphere analysis points to an atmosphere containing a mix of hydrogen and helium. This presumably requires the superficial convection zone to extend just below the hydrogen layer, thereby diluting hydrogen with helium. From this constraint, we can estimate \\(\\log {M}_{{\\rm{H}}}\/{M}_{* }=-6\\) (ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 83\" title=\"Rolland, B., Bergeron, P. &amp; Fontaine, G. On the spectral evolution of helium-atmosphere white dwarfs showing traces of hydrogen. Astrophys. J. 857, 56 (2018).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR83\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5790\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">83<\/a>). Cooling calculations were performed for different carbon\u2013oxygen core composition profiles to account for current model uncertainties: a standard profile predicted by stellar evolution<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 80\" title=\"Bauer, E. B. Carbon&#x2013;oxygen phase separation in Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA) white dwarf models. Astrophys. J. 950, 115 (2023).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR80\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5794\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">80<\/a> and an asteroseismologically derived stratification<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 84\" title=\"Giammichele, N., Charpinet, S. &amp; Brassard, P. Seismic cartography of white-dwarf interiors from the Toulouse-Montr&#xE9;al optimal-design approach. Front. Astron. Space Sci. 9, 879045 (2022).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR84\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5798\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">84<\/a> were used. We also calculated cooling models using different electron thermal conductivities<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 85\" title=\"Cassisi, S., Potekhin, A. Y., Pietrinferni, A., Catelan, M. &amp; Salaris, M. Updated electron-conduction opacities: the impact on low-mass stellar models. Astrophys. J. 661, 1094&#x2013;1104 (2007).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR85\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5803\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">85<\/a>,<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 86\" title=\"Blouin, S., Shaffer, N. R., Saumon, D. &amp; Starrett, C. E. New conductive opacities for white dwarf envelopes. Astrophys. J. 899, 46 (2020).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR86\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5806\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">86<\/a> to account for current uncertainties at the transition between the regimes of moderate and strong degeneracy<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 87\" title=\"Cassisi, S., Potekhin, A. Y., Salaris, M. &amp; Pietrinferni, A. Electron conduction opacities at the transition between moderate and strong degeneracy: uncertainties and impacts on stellar models. Astron. Astrophys. 654, A149 (2021).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR87\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5810\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">87<\/a>. From this analysis, we find a cooling age of 5.4\u2009\u00b1\u20090.7\u2009Gyr, in which the uncertainty includes the systematic uncertainty sources listed above and a 2% uncertainty on the Teff of the star and mass typical of white dwarfs in this temperature range<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 88\" title=\"Blouin, S., Dufour, P., Thibeault, C. &amp; Allard, N. F. A new generation of cool white dwarf atmosphere models. IV. Revisiting the spectral evolution of cool white dwarfs. Astrophys. J. 878, 63 (2019).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR88\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5818\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">88<\/a>. This cooling age is consistent with estimates produced by other stellar evolution codes<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 82\" title=\"Renedo, I. et al. New cooling sequences for old white dwarfs. Astrophys. J. 717, 183&#x2013;195 (2010).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR82\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5822\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">82<\/a>,<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 89\" title=\"Salaris, M., Cassisi, S., Pietrinferni, A. &amp; Hidalgo, S. The updated BASTI stellar evolution models and isochrones &#x2013; III. White dwarfs. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 509, 5197&#x2013;5208 (2022).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR89\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5825\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">89<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Thermal history of WD\u20091856\u2009b<\/p>\n<p>We reconstructed the thermal evolution of WD\u20091856\u2009b under the assumption that the cooling of the planet after migration has been similar to the cooling undergone by a substellar object after formation. We used cooling models from the ATMO2020 (ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 90\" title=\"Phillips, M. W. et al. A new set of atmosphere and evolution models for cool T&#x2013;Y brown dwarfs and giant exoplanets. Astron. Astrophys. 637, A38 (2020).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR90\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5837\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">90<\/a>) and Sonora Bobcat<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 91\" title=\"Marley, M. S. et al. The Sonora brown dwarf atmosphere and evolution models. I. Model description and application to cloudless atmospheres in rainout chemical equilibrium. Astrophys. J. 920, 85 (2021).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR91\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5841\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">91<\/a> model grids. Each grid tabulates global quantities such as luminosity, effective temperature, radius and surface gravity as a function of age for substellar objects of a given mass and bulk chemical composition, starting from an initial condition with high entropy. Both provide self-consistent evolutionary\u2013atmospheric modelling frameworks, in which the structure and evolution of the fully convective, adiabatic interior are computed with a cloudless, non-grey, rainout-chemical-equilibrium atmosphere as the surface boundary condition. The most important difference between ATMO2020 and Sonora Bobcat is that the former neglects some relevant opacity sources at effective temperatures above 2,000\u2009K, leading to faster cooling at high temperatures in the ATMO2020 models. ATMO2020 provides models of solar-metallicity objects, whereas Sonora Bobcat provides models for both solar-metallicity and metal-enriched ([M\/H]\u2009=\u2009+0.5) objects. We consider these three sets of models in our analysis below.<\/p>\n<p>Reconstructing the thermal history of WD\u20091856\u2009b requires us to choose a model grid and specify three parameters: planetary mass (Mp), current planetary effective temperature (Teff,p) and current white dwarf cooling age (twd). For a given Mp and model grid, we obtained the effective temperature as a function of time by adding a uniform offset (t0) to the model age (tp) such that the model temperature matches Teff,p at tp\u2009=\u2009twd\u2009\u2212\u2009t0 (using linear interpolation between the tabulated model ages and temperatures). The cooling models predict a high effective temperature (about 1,500\u20133,000\u2009K) at t0; these values are plausible for planets that have been tidally heated during high-eccentricity migration<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 92\" title=\"Rozner, M., Glanz, H., Perets, H. B. &amp; Grishin, E. Inflated eccentric migration of evolving gas giants I &#x2013; accelerated formation and destruction of hot and warm Jupiters. Astrophys. J. 931, 10 (2022).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR92\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5895\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">92<\/a>,<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 93\" title=\"Glanz, H., Rozner, M., Perets, H. B. &amp; Grishin, E. Inflated eccentric migration of evolving gas giants II &#x2013; numerical methodology and basic concepts. Astrophys. J. 931, 11 (2022).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR93\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5898\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">93<\/a> or have survived a common-envelope phase<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 8\" title=\"Lagos, F. et al. WD 1856 b: a close giant planet around a white dwarf that could have survived a common envelope phase. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 501, 676&#x2013;682 (2021).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR8\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5902\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">8<\/a>,<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 9\" title=\"Merlov, A., Bear, E. &amp; Soker, N. A red giant branch common-envelope evolution scenario for the exoplanet WD 1856 b. Astrophys. J. Lett. 915, L34 (2021).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR9\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5905\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">9<\/a>,<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 94\" title=\"O&#x2019;Connor, C. E., Bildsten, L., Cantiello, M. &amp; Lai, D. Giant planet engulfment by evolved giant stars: light curves, asteroseismology, and survivability. Astrophys. J. 950, 128 (2023).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR94\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e5908\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">94<\/a>. We therefore interpret t0 as an estimate of the time of the planet\u2019s reheating during migration, expressed as a white dwarf cooling age. Because cooling is rapid at high Teff,p, our estimate of t0 is robust to theoretical uncertainties in what temperature the planet should be immediately after migration.<\/p>\n<p>We considered cooling models with Mp between 0.5 and 20\u2009MJ, covering the range of samples from the atmospheric retrieval posterior distributions for the FIREFLy and Juniper JWST data reductions. Each grid samples a finite number of mass values; when considering objects of arbitrary mass between grid points, we used the cooling model with the nearest mass on the grid. Both the ATMO2020 and Sonora Bobcat models are spaced by about 0.5\u20131.0\u2009MJ in mass over the range we consider, so our approach does not introduce substantial error in a given reconstruction compared with interpolating between adjacent models.<\/p>\n<p>We generated ensembles of possible thermal histories using the mass and effective temperature constraints derived from the NIRSpec PRISM transmission spectrum of WD\u20091856\u2009b. Specifically, we considered nearly 10,000 values of Mp from the atmospheric retrieval posterior distribution alongside the nearly 10,000 corresponding values of Teff,p obtained using the procedure described above for each data reduction (see the \u2018Atmospheric retrieval analysis\u2019 section). Our samples of Mp and Teff,p are not statistically independent, as each pair of values is derived from a single sample from the distribution of atmospheric models consistent with our NIRSpec PRISM transmission spectrum. This has an important influence on the range of thermal histories that we can infer from the data, because the cooling rate is a sensitive function of mass.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, our estimated twd is independent of our atmospheric retrieval analysis. For each pair of Mp and Teff,p values, we generated ten random values of twd drawn from a Gaussian distribution with mean 5.4\u2009Gyr and standard deviation 0.7\u2009Gyr. Each ensemble therefore comprises about 100,000 possible thermal histories consistent with the transmission spectrum of WD\u20091856\u2009b. We generated one ensemble for each model grid. Extended Data Fig.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"figure anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Fig11\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">7<\/a> shows the distribution of calculated t0 values for the three cooling models and two data reductions, from which we derive a statistical constraint on t0. The results reported in the main text were obtained using the solar-metallicity Sonora Bobcat models (solid orange and green histograms; see also Fig.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"figure anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Fig4\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">4<\/a>). If we use the ATMO2020 models, we find a comparable \\({t}_{0}=4.{3}_{-1.1}^{+0.9}\\,{\\rm{Gyr}}\\) for FIREFLy and \\(4.{6}_{-1.0}^{+0.8}\\,{\\rm{Gyr}}\\) for Juniper. Using the metal-enriched Sonora Bobcat models yields \\({t}_{0}=4.{2}_{-1.4}^{+1.0}\\,{\\rm{Gyr}}\\) for FIREFLy and \\(4.{5}_{-1.1}^{+0.9}\\,{\\rm{Gyr}}\\) for Juniper. The conclusions we draw from modelling the thermal evolution of WD\u20091856\u2009b are therefore robust to both the JWST data reduction and the choice of cooling models, given the models available at present.<\/p>\n<p>In a small fraction of cases (&lt;0.15%) for each ensemble, we calculate values t0\u2009&lt;\u20090. These correspond to the highest Mp values sampled from the atmospheric retrieval posterior. Negative values of t0 arise in these cases because we have calculated t0 by extrapolating the cooling models back to the effective temperatures expected among newborn brown dwarfs of about 20\u2009MJ (&gt;2,000\u2009K). However, these results are unphysical according to the interpretation of t0 as the time elapsed between the end of the AGB phase and the reheating\/migration of the planet. If we stipulate that reconstructed thermal histories be truncated for t0\u2009&lt;\u20090, then these few cases are consistent with common-envelope evolution in that it is possible for the planet to have achieved its current temperature by passively cooling since the end of the AGB phase (albeit from a cooler, lower-entropy state than those implied in cases with t0\u2009&gt;\u20090). The fact remains, however, that most of the cases (&gt;99.85%) imply t0 values that cannot coincide with a common-envelope phase in all three ensembles. Thus, we conclude that reheating during the white dwarf phase (consistent with high-eccentricity migration) is preferred over reheating during common-envelope evolution at &gt;2\u03c3 (for FIREFLy) and &gt;3\u03c3 (for Juniper). Further theoretical study is needed to corroborate or qualify this conclusion, as we describe below.<\/p>\n<p>Our method of reconstructing thermal histories is based on backward extrapolation of the effective temperature only. However, the cooling models also predict the evolution of the radius of WD\u20091856\u2009b; these predictions should agree in principle. In Extended Data Fig.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"figure anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Fig12\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">8<\/a>, we show the radius evolution implied by our reconstruction method for 100 samples from the Sonora Bobcat ensemble for both data reductions. For the observed radius, we use the best-fitting value Rp\u2009=\u20090.911\u2009\u00b1\u20090.020\u2009RJ from the FIREFLy reduction. We also include a systematic error of \u00b10.050\u2009RJ given by the range of best-fitting radius values covered by the two data reductions, for a total uncertainty of \u00b10.054\u2009RJ. We see that many of the temperature-based reconstructions overestimate the radius of WD\u20091856\u2009b by about 2\u03c3. Future efforts to understand the thermal evolution of WD\u20091856\u2009b should reproduce both the effective temperature and radius. A clue as to the origin of this discrepancy comes from the heavy-element enrichment of the envelope of WD\u20091856\u2009b, suggested by our retrieved CH4 abundance, as planetary radius decreases with increasing metallicity at a fixed mass and internal entropy. Model grids of comparable quality with ATMO2020 and Sonora Bobcat that are applicable to objects as massive (about 7\u2009MJ) and metal-rich (about 100\u2009\u00d7\u2009solar) as WD\u20091856\u2009b have not been developed or published to our knowledge.<\/p>\n<p>We note that we neglected the irradiation of WD\u20091856\u2009b by the host white dwarf in our reconstruction of the planet\u2019s thermal history. Irradiation is a key ingredient in modelling the structure and evolution of short-period exoplanets around main-sequence stars, such as hot Jupiters<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 95\" title=\"Guillot, T., Burrows, A., Hubbard, W. B., Lunine, J. I. &amp; Saumon, D. Giant planets at small orbital distances. Astrophys. J. Lett. 459, L35 (1996).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR95\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e6296\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">95<\/a>,<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 96\" title=\"Arras, P. &amp; Bildsten, L. Thermal structure and radius evolution of irradiated gas giant planets. Astrophys. J. 650, 394&#x2013;407 (2006).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR96\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e6299\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">96<\/a>. The importance of irradiation in the case of WD\u20091856\u2009b can be gauged by calculating the ratio of the power emitted from the photosphere of the planet to the power incident on the planet from the star: <\/p>\n<p>$${\\mathcal{R}}=4{\\left(\\frac{{T}_{{\\rm{eff}},{\\rm{p}}}}{{T}_{{\\rm{eff}},\\ast }}\\right)}^{4}{\\left(\\frac{{a}_{{\\rm{orb}}}}{{R}_{\\ast }}\\right)}^{2},$$<\/p>\n<p>\n                    (9)\n                <\/p>\n<p>in which Teff,* and Teff,p are measured effective temperatures of the host star and planet, respectively, R* is the host radius and aorb is the orbital semimajor axis (assuming a near-circular orbit). Using the system parameters as determined in this work, we calculate \\({\\mathcal{R}}\\approx 25\\), indicating that the self-luminosity of the planet overwhelms the power received from the star. Our reconstructed histories generally find that this ratio was larger in the past (except perhaps in the first several Myr after the white dwarf formed). Thus, we argue that irradiation has had a small effect on the previous thermal evolution of WD\u20091856\u2009b. It would be of interest to self-consistently model the evolution of a substellar body with time-dependent irradiation, as would be the case in proximity to a cooling white dwarf. We leave this for future work.<\/p>\n<p>Alternatives to reheating during migration<\/p>\n<p>We considered several alternative explanations for the increased effective temperature of WD\u20091856\u2009b, all of which we deemed implausible or unlikely. We briefly describe each of them here, along with our reasoning.<\/p>\n<p>First, the observed effective temperature of WD\u20091856\u2009b cannot be explained purely by passive cooling over the system\u2019s total age of about 10\u2009Gyr (ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 1\" title=\"Vanderburg, A. et al. A giant planet candidate transiting a white dwarf. Nature 585, 363&#x2013;367 (2020).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR1\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e6521\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">1<\/a>). This is readily ruled out by consulting theoretical cooling models<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 90\" title=\"Phillips, M. W. et al. A new set of atmosphere and evolution models for cool T&#x2013;Y brown dwarfs and giant exoplanets. Astron. Astrophys. 637, A38 (2020).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR90\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e6525\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">90<\/a>,<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 91\" title=\"Marley, M. S. et al. The Sonora brown dwarf atmosphere and evolution models. I. Model description and application to cloudless atmospheres in rainout chemical equilibrium. Astrophys. J. 920, 85 (2021).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR91\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e6528\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">91<\/a>. To have an effective temperature of about 400\u2009K at an age of 10\u2009Gyr, WD\u20091856\u2009b would need to have a mass of approximately 24\u2009MJ. Our observations rule out such a high mass at &gt;3\u03c3 confidence.<\/p>\n<p>The mass of WD\u20091856\u2009b may be above the threshold for deuterium fusion in its core (about 13\u2009MJ) within 2\u03c3. However, although it is possible that WD\u20091856\u2009b was once heated internally by nuclear reactions, this cannot explain its present-day properties. Models of deuterium-burning brown dwarfs predict a total luminosity many orders of magnitude greater than that of WD\u20091856\u2009b (ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 97\" title=\"Chabrier, G., Baraffe, I., Allard, F. &amp; Hauschildt, P. Deuterium burning in substellar objects. Astrophys. J. Lett. 542, L119&#x2013;L122 (2000).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR97\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e6549\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">97<\/a>). The duration of deuterium burning (about 3\u201350\u2009Myr depending on mass<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 97\" title=\"Chabrier, G., Baraffe, I., Allard, F. &amp; Hauschildt, P. Deuterium burning in substellar objects. Astrophys. J. Lett. 542, L119&#x2013;L122 (2000).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR97\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e6553\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">97<\/a>) is much shorter than the total age of the system, so the primordial deuterium WD\u20091856\u2009b would have been destroyed early in the main-sequence lifetime of the host.<\/p>\n<p>Owing to the proximity of WD\u20091856\u2009b to its host, tidal interactions are another possible heat source inside the planet; this would be analogous to the heating of the Galilean satellite Io through its tidal interaction with Jupiter<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 98\" title=\"Peale, S. J., Cassen, P. &amp; Reynolds, R. T. Melting of Io by tidal dissipation. Science 203, 892&#x2013;894 (1979).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR98\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e6560\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">98<\/a>. For tidal heating to operate, the orbit of WD\u20091856\u2009b would need to be slightly eccentric rather than circular as is typically assumed. Assuming that the power dissipated by tidal friction is equal to the total power emitted by WD\u20091856\u2009b, we calculate the effective temperature of the planet, using the standard \u2018equilibrium tide\u2019 theory<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 99\" title=\"Hut, P. Tidal evolution in close binary systems. Astron. Astrophys. 99, 126&#x2013;140 (1981).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR99\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e6564\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">99<\/a>, as: <\/p>\n<p>$$\\begin{array}{c}{T}_{{\\rm{e}}{\\rm{f}}{\\rm{f}},{\\rm{p}}}={\\left(\\frac{21}{8{\\rm{\\pi }}}\\frac{{G}^{2}{M}_{\\ast }^{3}{R}_{{\\rm{p}}}^{3}}{{\\sigma }_{{\\rm{S}}{\\rm{B}}}{a}_{{\\rm{o}}{\\rm{r}}{\\rm{b}}}^{9}}{k}_{2{\\rm{p}}}{\\tau }_{{\\rm{p}}}{e}_{{\\rm{o}}{\\rm{r}}{\\rm{b}}}^{2}\\right)}^{1\/4}\\\\ \\,\\approx \\,400\\,{\\rm{K}}{\\left(\\frac{{M}_{\\ast }}{0.60{M}_{\\odot }}\\frac{{R}_{{\\rm{p}}}}{0.91{R}_{{\\rm{J}}}}\\right)}^{3\/4}{\\left(\\frac{{a}_{{\\rm{o}}{\\rm{r}}{\\rm{b}}}}{0.02{\\rm{A}}{\\rm{U}}}\\right)}^{-9\/4}\\\\ \\,\\times \\,{\\left(\\frac{{k}_{2{\\rm{p}}}}{0.4}\\frac{{\\tau }_{{\\rm{p}}}}{0.1{\\rm{s}}}\\right)}^{1\/4}{\\left(\\frac{{e}_{{\\rm{o}}{\\rm{r}}{\\rm{b}}}}{0.02}\\right)}^{1\/2}.\\end{array}$$<\/p>\n<p>\n                    (10)\n                <\/p>\n<p>Here G is the gravitational constant, \u03c3SB is the Stefan\u2013Boltzmann constant, M* is the mass of the host white dwarf, Rp is the radius of WD\u20091856\u2009b and aorb and eorb are respectively the orbital semimajor axis and eccentricity (with eorb\u2009\u226a\u20091). The quantities k2p and \u03c4p, known respectively as the tidal Love number and tidal lag time, characterize the dissipation inside WD\u20091856\u2009b in the standard equilibrium tidal theory. The reference values of M*, Rp and aorb used in equation\u2009(<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-track-action=\"equation anchor\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#Equ10\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">10<\/a>) match the observed system parameters. For k2p and \u03c4p, we use values similar to those inferred for Jupiter\u2019s dissipation of the tide raised by Io<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 100\" title=\"Gavrilov, S. V. &amp; Zharkov, V. N. Love numbers of the giant planets. Icarus 32, 443&#x2013;449 (1977).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR100\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e7296\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">100<\/a>,<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 101\" title=\"Lainey, V., Arlot, J.-E., Karatekin, &#xD6;. &amp; van Hoolst, T. Strong tidal dissipation in Io and Jupiter from astrometric observations. Nature 459, 957&#x2013;959 (2009).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR101\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e7299\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">101<\/a>. We see that tidal heating could, in principle, sustain the observed effective temperature of WD\u20091856\u2009b for an orbital eccentricity of about 0.02 (the highly uncertain values of k2p and \u03c4p notwithstanding). This would be consistent with orbital circularization in the end stage of high-eccentricity migration. However, the same dissipation would damp the orbital eccentricity on a characteristic timescale of roughly 0.075\u2009Gyr (ref.\u2009<a data-track=\"click\" data-track-action=\"reference anchor\" data-track-label=\"link\" data-test=\"citation-ref\" aria-label=\"Reference 99\" title=\"Hut, P. Tidal evolution in close binary systems. Astron. Astrophys. 99, 126&#x2013;140 (1981).\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10514-7#ref-CR99\" id=\"ref-link-section-d312051754e7312\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">99<\/a>). In this picture, we are observing WD\u20091856\u2009b in the very last, short-lived stage of high-eccentricity migration. Although we cannot rule it out based on the available data, we consider this explanation unlikely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Data reduction Our PRISM observation used 33 groups across 240 integrations, with each integration lasting 29.8\u2009s, for a&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1062972,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[8],"tags":[57018,5633,291738,3965,3966,70,52538,16,15],"class_list":["post-1062971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-atmospheric-chemistry","tag-exoplanets","tag-giant-planets","tag-humanities-and-social-sciences","tag-multidisciplinary","tag-science","tag-stellar-evolution","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116848377610852968","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1062971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1062971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1062971\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1062972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1062971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1062971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1062971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}