Context. After many attempts over more than a decade, high-resolution spectroscopy has recently delivered its first detections of molecular absorption in exoplanet atmospheres, both in transmission ...and thermal emission spectra. Targeting the combined signal from individual lines in molecular bands, these measurements use variations in the planet radial velocity to separate the planet signal from telluric and stellar contaminants. Aims. We apply high-resolution spectroscopy to probe molecular absorption in the day-side spectrum of the bright transiting hot Jupiter HD 189733b. Methods. We observed HD 189733b with the CRIRES high-resolution near-infrared spectograph on the Very Large Telescope during three nights, targeting possible absorption from carbon monoxide, water vapour, methane, and carbon dioxide, at 2.0 and 2.3 μm. Results. We detect a 5-σ absorption signal from CO at a contrast level of ~4.5 × 10-4 with respect to the stellar continuum, revealing the planet orbital radial velocity at 154+4-3 km s-1. This allows us to solve for the planet and stellar mass in a similar way as for stellar eclipsing binaries, resulting in 0.846+0.068-0.049M⊙ and Mp = 1.162+0.058-0.039 MJup. No significant absorption is detected from H2O, CO2, or CH4 and we determine upper limits on their line contrasts. Conclusions. The detection of CO in the day-side spectrum of HD 189733b can be made consistent with the haze layer proposed to explain the optical to near-infrared transmission spectrum if the layer is optically thin at the normal incidence angles probed by our observations, or if the CO abundance is high enough for the CO absorption to originate from above the haze. Our non-detection of CO2 at 2.0 μm is not inconsistent with the deep CO2 absorption from low-resolution NICMOS secondary eclipse data in the same wavelength range. If genuine, the absorption would be so strong that it blanks out any planet light completely in this wavelength range, leaving no high-resolution signal to be measured.
Ultra-hot Jupiters are emerging as a new class of exoplanets. Studying their chemical compositions and temperature structures will improve our understanding of their mass loss rate as well as their ...formation and evolution. We present the detection of ionized calcium in the two hottest giant exoplanets – KELT-9b and WASP-33b. By using transit datasets from CARMENES and HARPS-N observations, we achieved high-confidence-level detections of Ca II using the cross-correlation method. We further obtain the transmission spectra around the individual lines of the Ca II H&K doublet and the near-infrared triplet, and measure their line profiles. The Ca II H&K lines have an average line depth of 2.02 ± 0.17% (effective radius of 1.56 Rp) for WASP-33b and an average line depth of 0.78 ± 0.04% (effective radius of 1.47 Rp) for KELT-9b, which indicates that the absorptions are from very high upper-atmosphere layers close to the planetary Roche lobes. The observed Ca II lines are significantly deeper than the predicted values from the hydrostatic models. Such a discrepancy is probably a result of hydrodynamic outflow that transports a significant amount of Ca II into the upper atmosphere. The prominent Ca II detection with the lack of significant Ca I detection implies that calcium is mostly ionized in the upper atmospheres of the two planets.
Exoplanet observations promise one day to unveil the presence of extraterrestrial life. Atmospheric compounds in strong chemical disequilibrium would point to large-scale biological activity just as ...oxygen and methane do in the Earth's atmosphere. The cancellation of both the Terrestrial Planet Finder and Darwin missions means that it is unlikely that a dedicated space telescope to search for biomarker gases in exoplanet atmospheres will be launched within the next 25 years. Here we show that ground-based telescopes provide a strong alternative for finding biomarkers in exoplanet atmospheres through transit observations. Recent results on hot Jupiters show the enormous potential of high-dispersion spectroscopy to separate the extraterrestial and telluric signals, making use of the Doppler shift of the planet. The tansmission signal of oxygen from an Earth-twin orbiting a small red dwarf star is only a factor of three smaller than that of carbon monoxide recently detected in the hot Jupiter tau Bootis b, albeit such a star will be orders of magnitude fainter. We show that if Earth-like planets are common, the planned extremely large telescopes can detect oxygen within a few dozen transits. Ultimately, large arrays of dedicated flux-collector telescopes equipped with high-dispersion spectrographs can provide the large collecting area needed to perform a statistical study of life-bearing planets in the solar neighborhood.
We report a 4.8σ detection of water absorption features in the day side spectrum of the hot Jupiter HD 189733 b. We used high-resolution (R ∼ 100 000) spectra taken at 3.2 μm with CRIRES on the VLT ...to trace the radial-velocity shift of the water features in the planet's day side atmosphere during 5 h of its 2.2 d orbit as it approached secondary eclipse. Despite considerable telluric contamination in this wavelength regime, we detect the signal within our uncertainties at the expected combination of systemic velocity (
km s−1) and planet orbital velocity (
km s−1), and determine a H2O line contrast ratio of (1.3 ± 0.2) × 10−3 with respect to the stellar continuum. We find no evidence of significant absorption or emission from other carbon-bearing molecules, such as methane, although we do note a marginal increase in the significance of our detection to 5.1σ with the inclusion of carbon dioxide in our template spectrum. This result demonstrates that ground-based, high-resolution spectroscopy is suited to finding not just simple molecules like CO, but also to more complex molecules like H2O even in highly telluric contaminated regions of the Earth's transmission spectrum. It is a powerful tool that can be used for conducting an immediate census of the carbon- and oxygen-bearing molecules in the atmospheres of giant planets, and will potentially allow the formation and migration history of these planets to be constrained by the measurement of their atmospheric C/O ratios.
Context. The spectral signature of an exoplanet can be separated from the spectrum of its host star using high-resolution spectroscopy. During these observations, the radial component of the planet’s ...orbital velocity changes, resulting in a significant Doppler shift that allows its spectral features to be extracted. Aims. In this work, we aim to detect TiO in the optical transmission spectrum of HD 209458b. Gaseous TiO has been suggested as the cause of the thermal inversion layer invoked to explain the dayside spectrum of this planet. Methods. We used archival data from the 8.2 m Subaru telescope taken with the High Dispersion Spectrograph of a transit of HD 209458b in 2002. We created model transmission spectra that include absorption by TiO, and cross-correlated them with the residual spectral data after removal of the dominating stellar absorption features. We subsequently co-added the correlation signal in time, taking the change in Doppler shift due to the orbit of the planet into account. Results. We detect no significant cross-correlation signal due to TiO, though artificial injection of our template spectra into the data indicates a sensitivity down to a volume-mixing ratio of ~10-10. However, cross-correlating the template spectra with a HARPS spectrum of Barnard’s star yields only a weak wavelength-dependent correlation, even though Barnard’s star is an M4V dwarf that exhibits clear TiO absorption. We infer that the TiO line list poorly matches the real positions of TiO lines at spectral resolutions of ~100 000. Similar line lists are also used in the PHOENIX and Kurucz stellar atmosphere suites and we show that their synthetic M-dwarf spectra also correlate poorly with the HARPS spectra of Barnard’s star and five other M dwarfs. We conclude that the lack of an accurate TiO line list is currently critically hampering this high-resolution retrieval technique.
Most of the molecules detected thus far in exoplanet atmospheres, such as water and CO, are present for a large range of pressures and temperatures. In contrast, metal hydrides exist in much more ...specific regimes of parameter space, and so can be used as probes of atmospheric conditions. Iron hydride (FeH) is a dominant source of opacity in low-mass stars and brown dwarfs, and evidence for its existence in exoplanets has recently been observed at low resolution. We performed a systematic search of archival CARMENES near-infrared data for signatures of FeH during transits of 12 exoplanets. These planets span a large range of equilibrium temperatures (600 4000 K) and surface gravities (2.5 3.5). We did not find a statistically significant FeH signal in any of the atmospheres, but obtained potential low-confidence signals (signal-to-noise ratio ∼ 3) in two planets, WASP-33b and MASCARA-2b. Previous modeling of exoplanet atmospheres indicate that the highest volume mixing ratios (VMRs) of 10−7 to 10−9 are expected for temperatures between 1800 and 3000 K and log . The two planets for which we find low-confidence signals are in the regime where strong FeH absorption is expected. We performed injection and recovery tests for each planet and determined that FeH would be detected in every planet for VMRs , and could be detected in some planets for VMRs as low as . Additional observations are necessary to conclusively detect FeH and assess its role in the temperature structures of hot-Jupiter atmospheres.
Context.
Angular differential imaging (ADI) and spectral differential imaging (SDI) are well-established high-contrast imaging techniques, but their application is challenging for companions at small ...angular separations from their host stars.
Aims.
The aim of this paper is to investigate to what extent adaptive-optics assisted, medium-resolution (
R
~ 5000) integral field spectrographs (IFS) can be used to directly detect the absorption of molecular species in the spectra of planets and substellar companions when these are not present in the spectrum of the star.
Methods.
We analysed archival data of the
β
Pictoris system taken with the SINFONI integral field spectrograph located at ESO’s Very Large Telescope, originally taken to image
β
Pictoris b using ADI techniques. At each spatial position in the field, a scaled instance of the stellar spectrum is subtracted from the data after which the residuals are cross-correlated with model spectra. The cross-correlation co-adds the individual absorption lines of the planet emission spectrum constructively, while this is not the case for (residual) telluric and stellar features.
Results.
Cross-correlation with CO and H
2
O models results in significant detections of
β
Pictoris b with signal-to-noise ratios (S/Ns) of 13.7 and 16.4 respectively. Correlation with a
T
= 1700 K BT-Settl model provides a detection with an S/N of 22.8. This in contrast to application of ADI, which barely reveals the planet. While the adaptive optics system only achieved modest Strehl ratios of 19–27% leading to a raw contrast of 1:240 at the planet position, cross-correlation achieves a 3
σ
contrast limit of 2.7 × 10
−5
in this 2.5 hr data set, a factor ~40 below the raw noise level at an angular distance of 0.36′′ from the star.
Conclusions.
Adaptive-optics assisted, medium-resolution IFS, such as SINFONI on the VLT and OSIRIS on the Keck Telescope, can be used for high-contrast imaging utilizing cross-correlation techniques for planets that are close to their star and embedded in speckle noise. We refer to this method as molecule mapping, and advocate its application to observations with future medium resolution instruments, in particular ERIS on the VLT, HARMONI on the ELT and NIRSpec, and MIRI on the JWST.
We present three transit observations of HD 189733 b obtained with the high-resolution spectrograph CARMENES at Calar Alto. A strong absorption signal is detected in the near-infrared He I triplet at ...10830 Å in all three transits. During mid-transit, the mean absorption level is 0.88 ± 0.04% measured in a ±10 km s−1 range at a net blueshift of − 3.5 ± 0.4 km s−1 (10829.84–10830.57 Å). The absorption signal exhibits radial velocities of + 6.5 ± 3.1 km s−1 and − 12.6 ± 1.0 km s−1 during ingress and egress, respectively; all radial velocities are measured in the planetary rest frame. We show that stellar activity related pseudo-signals interfere with the planetary atmospheric absorption signal. They could contribute as much as 80% of the observed signal and might also affect the observed radial velocity signature, but pseudo-signals are very unlikely to explain the entire signal. The observed line ratio between the two unresolved and the third line of the He I triplet is 2.8 ± 0.2, which strongly deviates from the value expected for an optically thin atmospheres. When interpreted in terms of absorption in the planetary atmosphere, this favors a compact helium atmosphere with an extent of only 0.2 planetary radii and a substantial column density on the order of 4 × 1012 cm−2. The observed radial velocities can be understood either in terms of atmospheric circulation with equatorial superrotation or as a sign of an asymmetric atmospheric component of evaporating material. We detect no clear signature of ongoing evaporation, like pre- or post-transit absorption, which could indicate material beyond the planetary Roche lobe, or radial velocities in excess of the escape velocity. These findings do not contradict planetary evaporation, but only show that the detected helium absorption in HD 189733 b does not trace the atmospheric layers that show pronounced escape signatures.
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