Publication: Ionized calcium in the atmospheres of two ultra-hot exoplanets WASP-33b and KELT-9b
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2019-12-05
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Abstract
Ultra-hot Jupiters are emerging as a new class of exoplanets. Studying their chemical compositions and temperature structures will improve our understanding of their mass loss rate as well as their formation and evolution. We present the detection of ionized calcium in the two hottest giant exoplanets - KELT-9b and WASP-33b. By using transit datasets from CARMENES and HARPS-N observations, we achieved high-confidence-level detections of Ca II using the cross-correlation method. We further obtain the transmission spectra around the individual lines of the Ca II H&K doublet and the near-infrared triplet, and measure their line profiles. The Ca II H&K lines have an average line depth of 2.02 +/- 0.17% (effective radius of 1.56 R_p) for WASP-33b and an average line depth of 0.78 +/- 0.04% (effective radius of 1.47 R_p) for KELT-9b, which indicates that the absorptions are from very high upper-atmosphere layers close to the planetary Roche lobes. The observed Ca II lines are significantly deeper than the predicted values from the hydrostatic models. Such a discrepancy is probably a result of hydrodynamic outflow that transports a significant amount of Ca II into the upper atmosphere. The prominent Ca II detection with the lack of significant Ca I detection implies that calcium is mostly ionized in the upper atmospheres of the two planets.
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© ESO 2020. Artículo firmado por 28 autores. We are grateful to the anonymous referee for his/her report. F.Y. acknowledges the support of the DFG priority program SPP 1992 “Exploring the Diversity of Extrasolar Planets (RE 1664/16-1)”. CARMENES is an instrument for the Centro Astronómico Hispano-Alemán de Calar Alto (CAHA, Almería, Spain). CARMENES is funded by the German Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (MPG), the Spanish Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the European Union through FEDER/ERF FICTS-2011-02 funds, and the members of the CARMENES Consortium (Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie, Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Landessternwarte Königstuhl, Institut de Ciències de l’Espai, Institut für Astrophysik Göttingen, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Thüringer Landessternwarte Tautenburg, Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Hamburger Sternwarte, Centro de Astrobiología and Centro Astronómico Hispano-Alemán), with additional contributions by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, the German Science Foundation through the Major Research Instrumentation Programme and DFG Research Unit FOR2544 “Blue Planets around Red Stars”, the Klaus Tschira Stiftung, the states of Baden-Württemberg and Niedersachsen, and by the Junta de Andalucía. Based on data from the CARMENES data archive at CAB (INTA-CSIC). This work is based on observations made with the Italian Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG) operated on the island of La Palma by the Fundación Galileo Galilei of the INAF (Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica) at the Spanish Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias. P.M. and I.S. acknowledge support from the European 82 Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 694513.