A critical reassessment of the fundamental properties of GJ 504: Chemical composition and age

TL;DR

This study re-evaluates the age and chemical properties of GJ 504 using high-resolution spectroscopy, aiming to resolve debates about its planetary companion’s nature by accurately determining the star's evolutionary stage.

Contribution

It provides a detailed chemical characterization and age estimate of GJ 504 through differential spectroscopic analysis, clarifying its evolutionary status and the nature of its companion.

Findings

GJ 504's surface gravity is lower than that of a well-constrained reference star.

Chemical abundances suggest an older, solar-like age for GJ 504.

The age estimate favors a classification of the companion as a brown dwarf.

Abstract

The recent development of brand new observational techniques and theoretical models have greatly advanced the exoplanet research field. Despite significant achievements, which have allowed the detection of thousands extrasolar systems, a comprehensive understanding of planetary formation and evolution mechanisms is still desired. One relevant limitation is given by the accuracy in the measurements of planet-host star ages. The star GJ 504 has been found to host a substellar companion whose nature is strongly debated. There has been a recent difference of opinion in the literature owing to the uncertainty on the age of the system: a young age of $\sim$ 160 Myr would imply a giant planet as a companion, but a recent revision pointing to a solar age ($\sim$ 4 Gyr) instead suggests a brown dwarf. With the aim of shedding light on this debated topic, we have carried out a high-resolution spectroscopic study of GJ 504 to derive stellar parameters, metallicity, and abundances of both light and heavy elements, providing a full chemical characterisation. The main objective is to infer clues on the evolutionary stage (hence the age) of this system. We performed a strictly differential (line-by-line) analysis of GJ 504 with respect to two reference stars, that is the planet-host dwarf $\iota$ Hor and the subgiant HIP 84827. The former is crucial in this context because its stellar parameters (hence the evolutionary stage) is well constrained from asteroseismic observations. Regardless of the zero point offsets, our differential approach allows us to put tight constraints on the age of GJ 504 with respect to $\iota$ Hor, thereby minimising the internal uncertainties. We found that the surface gravity of GJ 504 is 0.2 $\pm$ 0.07 dex lower than that of the main-sequence star $\iota$ Hor, suggesting a past turn-off evolution[...]