Abstract
ABSTRACT Ultrahot Jupiters (UHJs) present excellent targets for atmospheric characterization. Their hot dayside temperatures (T ≳ 2200 K) strongly suppress the formation of condensates, leading to clear and highly inflated atmospheres extremely conducive to transmission spectroscopy. Recent studies using optical high-resolution spectra have discovered a plethora of neutral and ionized atomic species in UHJs, placing constraints on their atmospheric structure and composition. Our recent work has presented a search for molecular features and detection of Fe i in the UHJ WASP-121b using Very Large Telescope (VLT)/UV–Visual Echelle Spectrograph (UVES) transmission spectroscopy. Here, we present a systematic search for atomic species in its atmosphere using cross-correlation methods. In a single transit, we uncover potential signals of 17 atomic species that we investigate further, categorizing five as strong detections, three as tentative detections, and nine as weak signals worthy of further exploration. We confirm previous detections of Cr i, V i, Ca i, K i, and exospheric H i and Ca ii made with the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) and the Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO), and independently re-recover our previous detection of Fe i at 8.8σ using both the blue and red arms of the UVES data. We also add a novel detection of Sc ii at 4.2σ. Our results further demonstrate the richness of UHJs for optical high-resolution spectroscopy.
Highlights
The recently emerging class of exoplanets known as ultrahot Jupiters present an intriguing subject for study and characterization
Our recent work has presented a search for molecular features and detection of Fe I in the Ultrahot Jupiters (UHJs) WASP-121b using Very Large Telescope (VLT)/UV–Visual Echelle Spectrograph (UVES) transmission spectroscopy
In order to confirm and expand upon previous detections, we present an atomic species inventory of the UHJ WASP-121b, using high-resolution spectra taken with VLT/UVES (Dekker et al 2000), an instrument which has seen successful use for the exploration of exoplanet atmospheres (Snellen 2004; Khalafinejad et al 2017; Gibson et al 2019)
Summary
The recently emerging class of exoplanets known as ultrahot Jupiters (hereafter UHJs) present an intriguing subject for study and characterization These tidally locked gas giants orbit on extremely short periods around their parent stars and experience extreme irradiation, increasing their dayside temperatures to the point where their chemistry and atmospheric structure are expected to differ greatly from cooler hot Jupiters (dayside T 2200 K; e.g. Parmentier et al 2018). The dominant source of continuum opacity comes from scattering by H− ions created by the dissociation of molecular hydrogen and the abundance of These combined characteristics make UHJs excellent targets for atmospheric characterization via their transmission spectra (the fingerprint of the exoplanet spectrum found as the light from the host star passes through the upper layers of the atmosphere during transit). Simulations of UHJs using stellar models have predicted a plethora of neutral and ionized atomic species in their atmospheres (Lothringer et al 2018, 2020; Lothringer & Barman 2019)
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