Journal
ASTRONOMY & ASTROPHYSICS
Volume 616, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
EDP SCIENCES S A
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201833033
Keywords
planetary systems; planets and satellites: individual: WASP-127b; planets and satellites: atmospheres; techniques: spectroscopic
Categories
Funding
- Spanish Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness [ESP2013-48391-C4-2-R]
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [11503088]
- Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province [BK20151051]
- Minor Planet Foundation of the Purple Mountain Observatory
Ask authors/readers for more resources
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 4.1 sigma, 5.0 sigma, and 3.4 sigma, respectively. We performed a spectral retrieval modeling on the high-quality optical transmission spectrum newly acquired with the 10.4m 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 3.7 sigma for K and 5.1 sigma for Li (and only 1.8 sigma 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.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available