Ground-based, Near-infrared Exospectroscopy. II. Tentative Detection of Emission From the Extremely Hot Jupiter WASP-12b

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We report the tentative detection of the near-infrared emission of the Hot Jupiter WASP-12b with the low-resolution prism on IRTF/SpeX.

• We find a K-H contrast color of 0.137% +/- 0.054%, corresponding to a blackbody of temperature 2400 (+1500/-500) K and consistent with previous, photometric observations.
• We also revisit WASP-12b's energy budget on the basis of secondary eclipse observations: the dayside luminosity is a relatively poorly constrained (2.0-4.3) x 10^30 erg/s, but this still allows us to predict a day/night effective temperature contrast of 200-1,000 K (assuming A_B=0).
• Thus we conclude that WASP-12b probably does not have both a low albedo and low recirculation efficiency.