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Silicate clouds and a circumplanetary disk in the YSES-1 exoplanet system

Nature volume 643, pages 938–942 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Young exoplanets provide an important link between understanding planet formation and atmospheric evolution1. Direct imaging spectroscopy allows us to infer the properties of young, wide-orbit, giant planets with high signal-to-noise ratio. This allows us to compare this young population with exoplanets characterized by transmission spectroscopy, which has indirectly revealed the presence of clouds2,3,4, photochemistry5 and a diversity of atmospheric compositions6,7. Direct detections have also been made for brown dwarfs8,9, but direct studies of young giant planets in the mid-infrared were not possible before James Webb Space Telescope10. With two exoplanets around a solar-type star, the YSES-1 system is an ideal laboratory for studying this early phase of exoplanet evolution. Here we report the direct observations of silicate clouds in the atmosphere of the exoplanet YSES-1 c through its 9–11 µm absorption feature, and the first circumplanetary disk silicate emission around its sibling planet, YSES-1 b. The clouds of YSES-1 c are composed of either amorphous iron-enriched pyroxene or a combination of amorphous MgSiO3 and Mg2SiO4, with particle sizes of ≤0.1 μm at 1 millibar pressure. We attribute the emission from the disk around YSES-1 b to be from submicron olivine dust grains, which may have formed through collisions of planet-forming bodies in the disk.

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Fig. 1: Observed spectra of YSES-1 b and c.
Fig. 2: Semi-empirical analysis of the silicate absorption feature.
Fig. 3: YSES-1 c spectral comparison against silicate cloud models.
Fig. 4: YSES-1 b spectral comparison against forward model, retrieval and thermal disk emission model.

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Data availability

The data used in this paper are associated with the JWST program GO 2044 and are available from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (https://mast.stsci.edu). The dataset is available at https://doi.org/10.17909/a2vk-mh23. The data used for host star measurements are associated with the UVES/VLT Program (106.20ZM.00) and the XShooter/VLT Program (103.2008.001) and are available from the ESO Archive (https://archive.eso.org/).

Code availability

This study made use of the following software codes to analyse the data: NumPy84, astropy85, matplotlib86, SciPy87, pandas88, ForMoSA20,21, VIRGA69,70, PICASO71,72, pyMultinest41, WebbPSF38 and petitRADTRANS23. The spectral extraction script used for the MIRI LRS data is available at GitHub (https://github.com/mperrin/miri_lrs_fm).

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Acknowledgements

S.P. is supported by the ANID FONDECYT postdoctoral program no. 3240145 and an appointment to the NASA Postdoctoral Program at the NASA–Goddard Space Flight Center, administered by Oak Ridge Associated Universities under contract with NASA. V.D. acknowledges the financial contribution from PRIN MUR 2022 (code 2022YP5ACE) funded by the European Union—NextGeneration EU. This work is based on observations made with the NASA/ESA/CSA JWST. The data were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, under NASA contract NAS 5-03127 for JWST. These observations are associated with program JWST-GO-02044. Support for program JWST-GO-02044 was provided by NASA through a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Author information

Author notes

  1. V. D’Orazi

    Present address: The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD, USA

    K. K. W. Hoch, M. Perrin, C. Chen, J. Girard & L. Pueyo

  2. The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    M. Rowland & C. V. Morley

  3. NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA

    S. Petrus & S. E. Moran

  4. Instituto de Estudios Astrofísicos, Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias, Diego Portales University, Santiago, Chile

    S. Petrus

  5. Millennium Nucleus on Young Exoplanets and their Moons (YEMS), Santiago, Chile

    S. Petrus

  6. Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie, Heidelberg, Germany

    E. Nasedkin & G. Chauvin

  7. Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    E. Nasedkin

  8. Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

    C. Ingebretsen & W. O. Balmer

  9. European Southern Observatory, Garching, Germany

    J. Kammerer

  10. INAF - Padova Astronomical Observatory, Padova, Italy

    V. D’Orazi

  11. Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    T. Barman & S. E. Moran

  12. University of Grenoble Alpes, Saint-Martin-d’Hères, France

    M. Bonnefoy

  13. European Southern Observatory, Alonso de Córdova, Vitacura, Chile

    R. J. De Rosa

  14. San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA

    E. Gonzales

  15. Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    M. Kenworthy

  16. UC San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Q. M. Konopacky, J.-B. Ruffio & C. A. Theissen

  17. University of California Observatories, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

    B. Macintosh

  18. University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

    B. Macintosh

  19. Observatoire de la Cote d’Azur, Nice, France

    P. Palma-Bifani & B. Ren

  20. LESIA, Observatoire de Paris, Université Paris Sciences et Lettres, CNRS, Sorbonne University, Université de Paris, Paris, France

    P. Palma-Bifani

  21. European Space Agency Office, European Space Agency, Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD, USA

    E. Rickman

  22. Smith College, Northampton, MA, USA

    K. Ward-Duong

  23. California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Y. Zhang

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Contributions

All authors contributed to the paper, with some specific contributions as follows. K.K.W.H., M.P., Q.M.K., C.A.T., J.-B.R., C.V.M., E.G., K.W.-D., E.R., L.P., M.B., V.D., S.P., T.B., J.G., R.J.D.R., B.R. and G.C. aided in the development of the original proposal and made notable contributions to the overall design of the program. M.P. and K.K.W.H. generated the observing plan with input from the team. M.P. conducted the data reduction and starlight subtraction and performed the MIRI spectral extraction, and J.K. and K.K.W.H. co-led the spectral extraction of NIRSpec prism. M.R. led the cloud modelling effort, S.P. led the forward modelling effort and silicate index empirical analysis, E.N. led the retrieval effort, and C.I. led the thermal modelling with guidance from C.C.; P.P.-B. implemented the ability to fit a CPD in our forward modelling framework. M.K., Y.Z., S.E.M., W.O.B., B.R., R.J.D.R. and B.M. aided in the interpretation and made contributions to the writing of this paper. K.K.W.H., M.P., M.R., S.P., E.N. and C.I. generated figures for this paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to K. K. W. Hoch.

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Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Fig. 1 PSF subtraction of NIRSpec IFU Prism data to remove host star light.

The top row shows slices of the combined NIRSpec Prism data cube at five different wavelengths. The data orientation shown here is rotated 90° relative to Fig 1. The middle row shows slices of the PSF model of the host star. The bottom row shows slices of the resultant PSF-subtracted data cube, showing clearer detections of the companions without contamination from the host star. The diffuse roughly circular illumination seen in the third row at wavelengths <= 3 microns is believed to be an optical ghost from reflection within NIRSpec; this is not subtracted by the PSF modelling but owing to its location it has no impact on the extracted spectra of the two planets.

Extended Data Fig. 2 PSF subtraction and spectral extraction of MIRI LRS data of YSES-1 b.

The top panel shows the two separate nods in blue and red for YSES-1 b illustrating the spectral traces after PSF and background subtraction. The middle panel shows spectral extractions from both traces with 3 sigma errors plotted. The black spectra is the average of the two nods. The dashed spectrum shows the MAST reduced and extracted spectra to demonstrate the systematics removed by our PSF subtraction. The bottom panel shows the SNR over wavelength of the respective extracted spectra from the middle panel, as well as the ETC calculations from the Cycle 1 proposal.

Extended Data Fig. 3 PSF subtraction and spectral extraction of MIRI LRS data of YSES-1 c.

See Extended Data Fig. 2 caption for description.

Extended Data Fig. 4 Forward model and retrieved spectrum compared to YSES-1 c spectrum.

Left panel: the pressure-temperature profile for the nearest ExoRem grid point to the best-fit parameters, and a 90% confidence region for the pressure-temperature profile as inferred by the pRT retrieval. The dashed line indicates the emission contribution function averaged across wavelength. Most of the flux is emitted between 0.01 and 0.03 bar, just above the location of the silicate cloud layer whose optical depth is indicated by the purple shading. Also shown are representative condensation curves for MgSiO3, Mg2SiO4 and Fe, all of which are expected to condense deeper in the atmosphere than what is found by the retrieval. Right panel: the best-fit ExoRem forward model and the maximum-likelihood model from the pRT retrieval are compared to the observed spectrum of YSES-1 c.

Extended Data Fig. 5 Posterior parameter distributions for YSES-1 c as inferred from the pRT retrieval.

Not shown are the parameters for the PT profile, which is shown in Extended Data Fig. 4. The units of the chemical abundances are in log mass fraction.

Extended Data Fig. 6 Cloud composition, mean particle radius, cloud base pressure, and cloud particle density fits.

Shown in panel 1 are different silicate species of crystalline Mg2SiO4, crystalline MgSiO3 (averaged over all temperatures), and crystalline MgSiO3 at 928 K; panel 2 shows different particle radii fits; panel 3 shows different cloud base pressures; and panel 4 shows different particle densities, all against YSES-1 c.

Extended Data Table 1 Overview of JWST observations
Full size table
Extended Data Table 2 Priors for ExoREM forward model fitting and petitRADTRANS retrieval fitting
Full size table
Extended Data Table 3 Summary of forward modelling, retrieval fitting, and thermal modelling
Full size table

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

This file contains Supplementary Methods, Supplementary Fig. 1 and Supplementary References.

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Hoch, K.K.W., Rowland, M., Petrus, S. et al. Silicate clouds and a circumplanetary disk in the YSES-1 exoplanet system. Nature 643, 938–942 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09174-w

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