Probing the atmosphere of WASP-69 b with low- and high-resolution transmission spectroscopy

Abstract

Consideration of both low- and high-resolution transmission spectroscopy is key for obtaining a comprehensive picture of exoplanet atmospheres. In studies of transmission spectra, the continuum information is well established with low-resolution spectra, while the shapes of individual lines are best constrained with high-resolution observations. In this work, we aim to merge high- with low-resolution transmission spectroscopy to place tighter constraints on physical parameters of the atmospheres. We present the analysis of three primary transits of WASP-69 b in the visible (VIS) channel of the CARMENES instrument and perform a combined low- and high-resolution analysis using additional data from HARPS-N, OSIRIS/GTC, and WFC3/HST already available in the literature. We investigate the Na I D1 and D2 doublet, Hα, the Ca II infra-red triplet (IRT), and K I λ7699 Å lines, and we monitor the stellar photometric variability by performing long-term photometric observations with the STELLA telescope. During the first CARMENES observing night, we detected the planet Na I D2 and D1 lines at ~7 and ~3σ significance levels, respectively. We measured a D2/D1 intensity ratio of 2.5 ± 0.7, which is in agreement with previous HARPS-N observations. Our modelling of WFC3 and OSIRIS data suggests strong Rayleigh scattering, solar to super-solar water abundance, and a highly muted Na feature in the atmosphere of this planet, in agreement with previous investigations of this target. We use the continuum information retrieved from the low-resolution spectroscopy as a prior to break the degeneracy between the Na abundance, reference pressure, and thermosphere temperature for the high-resolution spectroscopic analysis. We fit the Na I D1 and D2 lines individually and find that the posterior distributions of the model parameters agree with each other within 1σ. Our results suggest that local thermodynamic equilibrium processes can explain the observed D2 /D1 ratio because the presence of haze opacity mutes the absorption features.