The atmospheric temperatures of the ultra-hot Jupiter KELT-9b straddle the transition between gas giants and stars, and therefore between two traditionally distinct regimes of atmospheric chemistry. ...Previous theoretical studies assume the atmosphere of KELT-9b to be in chemical equilibrium. Despite the high ultraviolet flux from KELT-9, we show using photochemical kinetic calculations that the observable atmosphere of KELT-9b is predicted to be close to chemical equilibrium, which greatly simplifies any theoretical interpretation of its spectra. It also makes the atmosphere of KELT-9b, which is expected to be cloud-free, a tightly constrained chemical system that lends itself to a clean set of theoretical predictions. Due to the lower pressures probed in transmission (compared to emission) spectroscopy, we predict the abundance of water to vary by several orders of magnitude across the atmospheric limb depending on temperature, which makes water a sensitive thermometer. Carbon monoxide is predicted to be the dominant molecule under a wide range of scenarios, rendering it a robust diagnostic of the metallicity when analyzed in tandem with water. All of the other usual suspects (acetylene, ammonia, carbon dioxide, hydrogen cyanide, methane) are predicted to be subdominant at solar metallicity, while atomic oxygen, iron, and magnesium are predicted to have relative abundances as high as 1 part in 10,000. Neutral atomic iron is predicted to be seen through a forest of optical and near-infrared lines, which makes KELT-9b suitable for high-resolution ground-based spectroscopy with HARPS-N or CARMENES. We summarize future observational prospects of characterizing the atmosphere of KELT-9b.
An overabundance of low-density Neptune-like planets Cubillos, Patricio; Erkaev, Nikolai V; Juvan, Ines ...
Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society,
04/2017, Letnik:
466, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We present a uniform analysis of the atmospheric escape rate of Neptune-like planets with estimated radius and mass (restricted to M sub( p) < 30 M...). For each planet, we compute the restricted ...Jeans escape parameter, ..., for a hydrogen atom evaluated at the planetary mass, radius, and equilibrium temperature. Values of Lambda ... 20 suggest extremely high mass-loss rates. We identify 27 planets (out of 167) that are simultaneously consistent with hydrogen-dominated atmospheres and are expected to exhibit extreme mass-loss rates. We further estimate the mass-loss rates (L sub( hy)) of these planets with tailored atmospheric hydrodynamic models. We compare L sub( hy) to the energy-limited (maximum-possible high-energy driven) mass-loss rates. We confirm that 25 planets (15 per cent of the sample) exhibit extremely high mass-loss rates (L sub( hy) > 0.1 M... Gyr super( -1)), well in excess of the energy-limited mass-loss rates. This constitutes a contradiction, since the hydrogen envelopes cannot be retained given the high mass-loss rates. We hypothesize that these planets are not truly under such high mass-loss rates. Instead, either hydrodynamic models overestimate the mass-loss rates, transit-timing-variation measurements underestimate the planetary masses, optical transit observations overestimate the planetary radii (due to high-altitude clouds), or Neptunes have consistently higher albedos than Jupiter planets. We conclude that at least one of these established estimations/techniques is consistently producing biased values for Neptune planets. Such an important fraction of exoplanets with misinterpreted parameters can significantly bias our view of populations studies, like the observed mass-radius distribution of exoplanets for example. (ProQuest: ... denotes formulae/symbols omitted.)
Large-scale exoplanet search surveys have shown evidence that atmospheric escape is a ubiquitous process that shapes the evolution and demographics of planets. However, we lack a detailed ...understanding of this process because very few exoplanets that have been discovered to date could be probed for signatures of atmospheric escape. Recently, the metastable helium triplet at 1.083
μ
m has been shown to be a viable window for the presence of He-rich escaping envelopes around short-period exoplanets. Our objective is to use, for the first time, the Phoenix spectrograph to search for helium in the upper atmosphere of the inflated hot Jupiter WASP-127 b. We observed one transit and reduced the data manually since no pipeline is available. We did not find a significant in-transit absorption signal indicative of the presence of helium around WASP-127 b, and we set a 90% confidence upper limit for excess absorption at 0.87% in a 0.75 Å passband covering the He triplet. Given the large scale height of this planet, the lack of a detectable feature is likely due to unfavorable photoionization conditions for populating the metastable He
I
triplet. This conclusion is supported by the inferred low coronal and chromospheric activity of the host star and the old age of the system, which result in a relatively mild high-energy environment around the planet.
Abstract
Ultra-hot Jupiters with equilibrium temperatures greater than 2000 K are uniquely interesting targets as they provide us crucial insights into how atmospheres behave under extreme ...conditions. This class of giant planets receives intense radiation from their host star and usually has strongly irradiated and highly inflated atmospheres. At such a high temperature, cloud formation is expected to be suppressed and thermal dissociation of water vapor could occur. We observed the ultra-hot Jupiter WASP-76b with seven transits and five eclipses using the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope (Spitzer) for a comprehensive study of its atmospheric chemical and physical processes. We detected TiO and H
2
O absorption in the optical and near-infrared transit spectrum. Additional absorption by a number of neutral and ionized heavy metals like Fe, Ni, Ti, and SiO help explain the short-wavelength transit spectrum. The secondary eclipse spectrum shows muted water feature but a strong CO emission feature in Spitzer’s 4.5
μ
m band indicating an inverted temperature pressure profile. We analyzed both the transit and eclipse spectra with a combination of self-consistent PHOENIX models and atmospheric retrieval. Both spectra were well fitted by the self-consistent PHOENIX forward atmosphere model in chemical and radiative equilibrium at solar metallicity, adding to the growing evidence that both TiO/VO and NUV heavy metals opacity are prominent NUV-optical opacity sources in the stratospheres of ultra-hot Jupiters.
ABSTRACT
We observed a transit of WASP-166 b using nine Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) telescopes simultaneously with the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) observations of the same ...transit. We achieved a photometric precision of 152 ppm per 30 min with the nine NGTS telescopes combined, matching the precision reached by TESS for the transit event around this bright (T = 8.87) star. The individual NGTS light-curve noise is found to be dominated by scintillation noise and appears free from any time-correlated noise or any correlation between telescope systems. We fit the NGTS data for TC and Rp/R*. We find TC to be consistent to within 0.25σ of the result from the TESS data, and the difference between the TESS and NGTS measured Rp/R* values is 0.9σ. This experiment shows that multitelescope NGTS photometry can match the precision of TESS for bright stars, and will be a valuable tool in refining the radii and ephemerides for bright TESS candidates and planets. The transit timing achieved will also enable NGTS to measure significant transit timing variations in multiplanet systems.
The strong, nearly wavelength-independent absorption cross section of aerosols produces featureless exoplanet transmission spectra, limiting our ability to characterize their atmospheres. Here, we ...show that even in the presence of featureless spectra, we can still characterize certain atmospheric properties. Specifically, we constrain the upper and lower pressure boundaries of aerosol layers, and present plausible composition candidates. We study the case of the bloated Saturn-mass planet WASP-49 b, where near-infrared observations reveal a flat transmission spectrum between 0.7 and 1.0 m. First, we use a hydrodynamic upper-atmosphere code to estimate the pressure reached by the ionizing stellar high-energy photons at bar, setting the upper pressure boundary where aerosols could exist. Then, we combine HELIOS and Pyrat Bay radiative-transfer models to constrain the temperature and photospheric pressure of atmospheric aerosols, in a Bayesian framework. For WASP-49 b, we constrain the transmission photosphere (hence, the aerosol deck boundaries) to pressures above bar (100× solar metallicity), bar (solar), and bar (0.1× solar) as the lower boundary, and below bar as the upper boundary. Lastly, we compare condensation curves of aerosol compounds with the planet's pressure-temperature profile to identify plausible condensates responsible for the absorption. Under these circumstances, we find these candidates: (at 100× solar metallicity); Cr and MnS (at solar and 0.1× solar); and forsterite, enstatite, and alabandite (at 0.1× solar).
A CHEOPS white dwarf transit search Morris, Brett M.; Heng, Kevin; Brandeker, Alexis ...
Astronomy and astrophysics (Berlin),
07/2021, Letnik:
651
Journal Article
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Odprti dostop
White dwarf spectroscopy shows that nearly half of white dwarf atmospheres contain metals that must have been accreted from planetary material that survived the red giant phases of stellar evolution. ...We can use metal pollution in white dwarf atmospheres as flags, signalling recent accretion, in order to prioritize an efficient sample of white dwarfs to search for transiting material. We present a search for planetesimals orbiting six nearby white dwarfs with the CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite (CHEOPS). The targets are relatively faint for CHEOPS, 11 mag <
G
< 12.8 mag. We used aperture photometry data products from the CHEOPS mission as well as custom point-spread function photometry to search for periodic variations in flux due to transiting planetesimals. We detect no significant variations in flux that cannot be attributed to spacecraft systematics, despite reaching a photometric precision of < 2 ppt in 60 s exposures on each target. We simulate observations to show that the small survey is sensitive primarily to Moon-sized transiting objects with periods between 3 h <
P
< 10 h, with radii of
R
≳ 1000 km.
We present the discovery by the WASP-South survey of WASP-121 b, a new remarkable short-period transiting hot Jupiter. The planet has a mass of
$1.183_{-0.062}^{+0.064}$
M
Jup, a radius of 1.865 ± ...0.044 R
Jup, and transits every
$1.274\,9255_{-0.000\,0025}^{+0.000\,0020}$
days an active F6-type main-sequence star (V = 10.4,
$1.353_{-0.079}^{+0.080}$
M⊙, 1.458 ± 0.030 R⊙, T
eff = 6460 ± 140 K). A notable property of WASP-121 b is that its orbital semimajor axis is only ∼1.15 times larger than its Roche limit, which suggests that the planet is close to tidal disruption. Furthermore, its large size and extreme irradiation (∼7.1 109 erg s−1 cm−2) make it an excellent target for atmospheric studies via secondary eclipse observations. Using the TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope, we indeed detect its emission in the z
′-band at better than ∼4σ, the measured occultation depth being 603 ± 130 ppm. Finally, from a measurement of the Rossiter–McLaughlin effect with the CORALIE spectrograph, we infer a sky-projected spin-orbit angle of
$257{^{\circ}_{.}} 8_{-5{^{\circ}_{.}} 5}^{+5{^{\circ}_{.}} 3}$
. This result may suggest a significant misalignment between the spin axis of the host star and the orbital plane of the planet. If confirmed, this high misalignment would favour a migration of the planet involving strong dynamical events with a third body.
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