Detection of rubidium and samarium in the atmosphere of the ultra-hot Jupiter MASCARA-4b
arXiv:2304.04948 · doi:10.3847/1538-3881/accb54
Abstract
Ultra-hot Jupiters (UHJs) possess the most extreme environments among various types of exoplanets, making them ideal laboratories to study the chemical composition and kinetics properties of exoplanet atmosphere with high-resolution spectroscopy (HRS). It has the advantage of resolving the tiny Doppler shift and weak signal from exoplanet atmosphere and has helped to detect dozens of heavy elements in UHJs including KELT-9b, WASP-76b, WASP-121b. MASCARA-4b is a 2.8-day UHJ with an equilibrium temperature of K, which is expected to contain heavy elements detectable with VLT. In this letter, we present a survey of atoms/ions in the atmosphere of the MASCARA-4b, using the two VLT/ESPRESSO transits data. Cross-correlation analyses are performed on the obtained transmission spectra at each exposure with the template spectra generated by petitRADTRANS for atoms/ions from element Li to U. We confirm the previous detection of Mg, Ca, Cr and Fe and report the detection of Rb, Sm, Ti+ and Ba+ with peak signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) 5. We report a tentative detection of Sc+, with peak SNRs 6 but deviating from the estimated position. The most interesting discovery is the first-time detection of elements Rb and Sm in an exoplanet. Rb is an alkaline element like Na and K, while Sm is the first lanthanide series element and is by far the heaviest one detected in exoplanets. Detailed modeling and acquiring more data are required to yield abundance ratios of the heavy elements and to understand better the common presence of them in UHJ's atmospheres.
11 pages, 7 figures, Accepted to AJ
References in corpus (14)
- Molecfit: A general tool for telluric absorption correction. I. Method and application to ESO instruments
- petitRADTRANS: a Python radiative transfer package for exoplanet characterization and retrieval
- Determining stellar atmospheric parameters and chemical abundances of FGK stars with iSpec
- Molecfit: A general tool for telluric absorption correction II. Quantitative evaluation on ESO-VLT X-Shooter spectra
- Modern stellar spectroscopy caveats
- Spectrally resolved detection of sodium in the atmosphere of HD189733b with the HARPS spectrograph
- A spectral survey of an ultra-hot Jupiter: Detection of metals in the transmission spectrum of KELT-9 b
- Retrieving scattering clouds and disequilibrium chemistry in the atmosphere of HR 8799e
- Mass loss rate and local thermodynamic state of KELT-9 b thermosphere from the hydrogen Balmer series
- Search for water vapor in the high-resolution transmission spectrum of HD189733b in the visible
- Confirmation of WASP-107b's extended Helium atmosphere with Keck II/NIRSPEC
- Detection of barium in the atmospheres of the ultra-hot gas giants WASP-76b and WASP-121b
- Atmospheric characterization of the ultra-hot Jupiter WASP-33b: Detection of Ti and V emission lines and retrieval of a broadened line profile
- Transmission spectroscopy of the ultra-hot Jupiter MASCARA-4 b: Disentangling the hydrostatic and exospheric regimes of ultra-hot Jupiters