Bibcode
Chen, G.; Pallé, E.; Welbanks, L.; Prieto-Arranz, J.; Madhusudhan, N.; Gandhi, S.; Casasayas-Barris, N.; Murgas, F.; Nortmann, L.; Crouzet, N.; Parviainen, H.; Gandolfi, D.
Bibliographical reference
Astronomy and Astrophysics, Volume 616, id.A145, 14 pp.
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8
2018
Journal
Citations
83
Refereed citations
75
Description
Exoplanets with relatively clear atmospheres are prime targets for
detailed studies of chemical compositions and abundances in their
atmospheres. Alkali metals have long been suggested to exhibit broad
wings due to pressure broadening, but most of the alkali detections only
show very narrow absorption cores, probably because of the presence of
clouds. We report the strong detection of the pressure-broadened
spectral profiles of Na, K, and Li absorption in the atmosphere of the
super-Neptune WASP-127b, at 4.1σ, 5.0σ, and 3.4σ,
respectively. We performed a spectral retrieval modeling on the
high-quality optical transmission spectrum newly acquired with the 10.4
m Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), in combination with the re-analyzed
optical transmission spectrum obtained with the 2.5 m Nordic Optical
Telescope (NOT). By assuming a patchy cloudy model, we retrieved the
abundances of Na, K, and Li, which are super-solar at 3.7σ for K
and 5.1σ for Li (and only 1.8σ for Na). We constrained the
presence of haze coverage to be around 52%. We also found a hint of
water absorption, but cannot constrain it with the global retrieval
owing to larger uncertainties in the probed wavelengths. WASP-127b will
be extremely valuable for atmospheric characterization in the era of
James Webb Space Telescope.
The reduced spectra and the narrow-band light-curves are only available
at the CDS via anonymous ftp to http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr (http://130.79.128.5) or via http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/qcat?J/A+A/616/A145
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Pallé Bago