Vanadium oxide and a sharp onset of cold-trapping on a giant exoplanet
- Creators
- Pelletier, Stefan
- Benneke, Björn
- Ali-Dib, Mohamad
- Prinoth, Bibiana
- Kasper, David
- Seifahrt, Andreas
- Bean, Jacob L.
- Debras, Florian
- Klein, Baptiste
- Bazinet, Luc
- Hoeijmakers, H. Jens
- Kesseli, Aurora Y.
- Lim, Olivia
- Carmona, Andres
- Pino, Lorenzo
- Casasayas-Barris, Núria
- Hood, Thea
- Stürmer, Julian
Abstract
The abundance of refractory elements in giant planets can provide key insights into their formation histories. Owing to the low temperatures of the Solar System giants, refractory elements condense below the cloud deck, limiting sensing capabilities to only highly volatile elements. Recently, ultra-hot giant exoplanets have allowed for some refractory elements to be measured, showing abundances broadly consistent with the solar nebula with titanium probably condensed out of the photosphere. Here we report precise abundance constraints of 14 major refractory elements on the ultra-hot giant planet WASP-76b that show distinct deviations from proto-solar and a sharp onset in condensation temperature. In particular, we find nickel to be enriched, a possible sign of the accretion of the core of a differentiated object during the evolution of the planet. Elements with condensation temperatures below 1,550 K otherwise closely match those of the Sun before sharply transitioning to being strongly depleted above 1,550 K, which is well explained by nightside cold-trapping. We further unambiguously detect vanadium oxide on WASP-76b, a molecule long suggested to drive atmospheric thermal inversions, and also observe a global east–west asymmetry in its absorption signals. Overall, our findings indicate that giant planets have a mostly stellar-like refractory elemental content and suggest that temperature sequences of hot Jupiter spectra can show abrupt transitions wherein a mineral species is either present or completely absent if a cold trap exists below its condensation temperature.
Additional Information
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2023. This work is based on observations obtained at the international Gemini Observatory, a program of the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s NOIRLab, which is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the NSF on behalf of the Gemini Observatory partnership: the NSF (USA), National Research Council (Canada), Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (Chile), Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (Argentina), Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia, Inovações e Comunicações (Brazil), and Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (Republic of Korea).This work was enabled by observations made from the Gemini North telescope, located within the Maunakea Science Reserve and adjacent to the summit of Maunakea. We are grateful for the privilege of observing the Universe from a place that is unique in both its astronomical quality and its cultural significance. This research has made use of NASA's Astrophysics Data System and the NASA Exoplanet Archive, which is operated by the California Institute of Technology, under contract with NASA within the Exoplanet Exploration Program. S.P. is supported by the Technologies for Exo-Planetary Science (TEPS) Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) CREATE Trainee Program. B.B. acknowledges funding by the NSERC and the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Nature et Technologies (FRQNT). M.A.-D. is supported by Tamkeen under the NYU Abu Dhabi Research Institute, United Arab Emirates grant CAP3. B.P. acknowledges partial financial support from the Fund of the Walter Gyllenberg Foundation. D.K., A.S. and J.L.B. acknowledge funding from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Gemini Observatory, the NSF (award number 2108465) and NASA (grant numbers 80NSSC22K0117 and 80NSSC19K0293). F.D. thanks the CNRS/INSU Programme National de Planétologie (PNP) and Programme National de Physique Stellaire (PNPS) for funding support. B.K. acknowledges funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Horizon 2022 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 865624, GPRV). O.L. acknowledges financial support from the FRQNT (270853 and 303926), the NSERC, the Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx) and from the University of Montreal. A.C. acknowledges funding from the French ANR under contract number ANRCE310019 (SPlaSH). This work is supported by the French National Research Agency in the framework of the Investissements d'Avenir programme (ANR-15-IDEX-02), through the funding of the "Origin of Life" project of Grenoble-Alpes University. Contributions. S.P., B.B. and L.P. conceived the project. S.P. wrote the original MAROON-X observing proposal and the manuscript and carried out the analysis of the MAROON-X data, with B.B. and H.J.H. providing guidance. M.A.-D. performed the accretion modelling portion of the analysis. B.P. independently analysed the ESPRESSO data to confirm the VO detection. D.K., A.S., J.L.B. and J.S. assisted with the observational setup, carried out the observations and performed the MAROON-X data extraction. F.D., B.K., T.H. and A.C. acquired and contributed extra data for the project. L.B. implemented the FastChem equilibrium chemistry code in the modelling framework. A.Y.K., O.L. and N.C.-B. contributed to the stellar contamination detrending algorithm. All co-authors provided comments and suggestions about the manuscript. Data availability. The MAROON-X data used in this work are available at https://udemontreal-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/stefan_pelletier_umontreal_ca/EkYThK-JMKFHlclyx7RnlIABySi6V60HuZC0c_9m6LfE6Q?e=vGErBT. The ESPRESSO data used to confirm the VO detection are publicly available on Dace (https://dace.unige.ch/dashboard/). Source data are provided with this paper. Code availability. The MAROON-X reduction pipeline used by the instrument team to perform the data extraction is public software available from Gemini at https://github.com/GeminiDRSoftware/MAROONXDR. The atmospheric modelling and retrievals use SCARLET, HELIOS-K (https://helios-k.readthedocs.io), FastChem (https://github.com/exoclime/FastChem), emcee (https://emcee.readthedocs.io/en/stable/) and corner.py (https://corner.readthedocs.io/en/latest/). The ESPRESSO data analysis was performed using Tayph (https://github.com/Hoeijmakers/tayph). The main analysis routines written for this work and using the astropy, matplotlib, numpy, scipy and scikit-learn Python libraries are available at https://udemontreal-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/stefan_pelletier_umontreal_ca/EmXMwsPp2JFCnckKJNWkf7ABrEomi5EqmadxK4Hofd7ItQ?e=73GbIp. The authors declare no competing interests.Attached Files
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 122072
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20230630-524942000.6
- Gemini Partnership
- NASA/JPL/Caltech
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
- 270853
- Fonds de recherche du Québec - Nature et technologies (FRQNT)
- CAP3
- New York University Abu Dhabi
- Walter Gyllenberg Foundation
- David and Lucile Packard Foundation
- Heising-Simons Foundation
- Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
- AST-2108465
- NSF
- 80NSSC22K0117
- NASA
- 80NSSC19K0293
- NASA
- Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
- Institut national des sciences de l'Univers (INSU)
- Programme National de Planétologie (PNP)
- Programme National de Physique Stellaire (PNPS)
- 865624
- European Research Council (ERC)
- 303926
- Fonds de recherche du Québec - Nature et technologies (FRQNT)
- Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx)
- University of Montreal
- ANRCE310019
- Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR)
- ANR-15-IDEX-02
- Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR)
- Created
-
2023-07-01Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2023-07-01Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)