On the Chemical Abundance of HR 8799 and the Planet c

Creators: Wang, Ji; Wang, Jason J.; Ma, Bo; Chilcote, Jeffrey; Ertel, Steve; Guyon, Olivier; Ilyin, Ilya; Jovanovic, Nemanja; Kalas, Paul; Lozi, Julien; Macintosh, Bruce; Strassmeier, Klaus G.; Stone, Jordan

Abstract

Comparing chemical abundances of a planet and the host star reveals the origin and formation pathway of the planet. Stellar abundance is measured with high-resolution spectroscopy. Planet abundance, on the other hand, is usually inferred from low-resolution data. For directly imaged exoplanets, the data are available from a slew of high-contrast imaging/spectroscopy instruments. Here, we study the chemical abundance of HR 8799 and its planet c. We measure stellar abundance using LBT/PEPSI (R = 120,000) and archival HARPS data: stellar [C/H], [O/H], and C/O are 0.11 ± 0.12, 0.12 ± 0.14, and 0.54^(+0.12)_(-0.09), all consistent with solar values. We conduct atmospheric retrieval using newly obtained Subaru/CHARIS data together with archival Gemini/GPI and Keck/OSIRIS data. We model the planet spectrum with petitRADTRANS and conduct retrieval using PyMultiNest. Retrieved planetary abundance can vary by ~0.5 dex, from sub-stellar to stellar C and O abundances. The variation depends on whether strong priors are chosen to ensure a reasonable planet mass. Moreover, comparison with previous works also reveals inconsistency in abundance measurements. We discuss potential issues that can cause the inconsistency, e.g., systematics in individual data sets and different assumptions in the physics and chemistry in retrieval. We conclude that no robust retrieval can be obtained unless the issues are fully resolved.

Additional Information

© 2020 The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. Received 2020 June 5; revised 2020 July 29; accepted 2020 August 1; published 2020 September 2. We would like to thank Quinn Konopacky for providing Keck/OSIRIS data, Baptieste Lavie for providing the retrieval posterior samples for comparison, Jonathan Fortney for insightful discussions on atmospheric retrieval, Paul Molliere for the help in setting up and running petitRADTRANS. We thank the anonymous referee for his/her constructive comments and suggestions that greatly improved the manuscript. We thank the Heising-Simons Foundation for supporting the workshop on combining high-resolution spectroscopy and high-contrast imaging for exoplanet characterization, where the idea originated on combining photometric data and spectral data of different resolutions. B.M. thanks the support of CSST grant and NSFC grant U1931102. The data presented herein were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain. We are grateful for the PEPSI and LBTI data from LBT. The LBT is an international collaboration among institutions in the United States, Italy, and Germany. The LBT Corporation partners are: The University of Arizona on behalf of the Arizona university system; Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica, Italy; LBT Beteiligungsgesellschaft, Germany, representing the Max Planck Society, the Astrophysical Institute Potsdam, and Heidelberg University; The Ohio State University; The Research Corporation, on behalf of The University of Notre Dame, University of Minnesota, and University of Virginia. We thank the LBTI team for offering their instrument to the community and the opportunity to attempt the parallel observations with PEPSI. Jordan Stone is supported by NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF2-51398.001-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS5-26555.

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Submitted - 2007.02810v2.pdf

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