Exoplanetology: Exoplanets & Exomoons

High-resolution Transmission Spectroscopy Of Warm Jupiters: An ESPRESSO Sample With Predictions For ANDES

By Keith Cowing
Status Report
astro-ph.EP
June 14, 2024
Filed under , , , , , , , , , , ,
High-resolution Transmission Spectroscopy Of Warm Jupiters: An ESPRESSO Sample With Predictions For ANDES
Transmission spectra models including H2O, CH4 and CO of TOI-3362 b (top) and TOI-677 b (bottom) in black with corresponding absorption bands of H2O, CH4 and CO for reference in shades of pink. Top panel: Model spectra of TOI3362 b including absorption of H2O, CH4 and CO. The models assume an isothermal atmosphere at the calculated equilibrium temperature of Teq,A=0 = 1 100 K. The corresponding abundance profiles were computed with FastChem Cond (Stock et al. 2018, 2022; Kitzmann et al. 2023), see Fig. 4, and then translated into mass fractions to produce the transmission models using petitRADTRANS (Mollière et al. 2019). The H2O mass fractions were scaled with factors of 1 (nominal), 10, 100, and 1000 for model injection. Considered absorption bands included in the model to identify the features. The absorption band models were computed under the same assumption, but only including the considered species. Bottom panel: Same as top panel, but for TOI-677 b. The models assume an isothermal atmosphere at the calculated equilibrium temperature of Teq = 1 252 K (Jordán et al. 2020). — astro-ph.EP

Warm Jupiter atmospheres predominantly consist of molecular species, notably water, methane and carbon monoxide, often accompanied by clouds and hazes muting their atmospheric features. In this study, we investigate the atmospheres of six warm Jupiters K2-139 b, K2-329 b, TOI- 3362 b, WASP-130 b, WASP-106 b, and TOI-677 b to search for water absorption using the ESPRESSO spectrograph, reporting non-detections for all targets.

These non-detections are partially attributed to planets having in-transit radial velocity changes that are typically too small to distinguish between the different components (star, planet, Rossiter-McLaughlin effect and telluric contamination), as well as the relatively weak planetary absorption lines as compared to the S/N of the spectra. We simulate observations for the upcoming high-resolution spectrograph ANDES at the Extremely Large Telescope for the two favourable planets on eccentric orbits, TOI-3362b and TOI-677 b, searching for water, carbon monoxide, and methane.

We predict a significant detection of water and CO, if ANDES indeed covers the K-band, in the atmospheres of TOI-677 b and a tentative detection of water in the atmosphere of TOI-3362b. This suggests that planets on highly eccentric orbits with favourable orbital configurations present a unique opportunity to access cooler atmospheres.

Bibiana Prinoth, Elyar Sedaghati, Julia V. Seidel, H. Jens Hoeijmakers, Rafael Brahm, Brian Thorsbro, Andrés Jordán

Comments: 20 pages, 11 figures, under review at AAS Journals, first revision submitted
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:2406.08558 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2406.08558v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Bibiana Prinoth
[v1] Wed, 12 Jun 2024 18:01:07 UTC (10,592 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.08558
Astrobiology

Keith Cowing

Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Station Payload manager/space biologist, Away Teams, Journalist, Lapsed climber, Synaesthete, Na’Vi-Jedi-Freman-Buddhist-mix, ASL, Devon Island and Everest Base Camp veteran, (he/him) 🖖🏻

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