Detection of Water Vapor in the Thermal Spectrum of the Non-Transiting Hot Jupiter upsilon Andromedae b

TL;DR

This paper reports the detection of water vapor in the atmosphere of the non-transiting hot Jupiter upsilon Andromedae b using high-resolution ground-based spectroscopy, resolving its orbital parameters and atmospheric composition.

Contribution

It introduces a spectroscopic binary approach to detect atmospheric water vapor and determine the planet's true mass and inclination for a non-transiting exoplanet.

Findings

Detected water vapor in upsilon Andromedae b's atmosphere.

Measured the planet's true mass as 1.7 Jupiter masses.

Determined the orbital inclination to be 24 degrees.

Abstract

The upsilon Andromedae system was the first multi-planet system discovered orbiting a main sequence star. We describe the detection of water vapor in the atmosphere of the innermost non-transiting gas giant ups~And~b by treating the star-planet system as a spectroscopic binary with high-resolution, ground-based spectroscopy. We resolve the signal of the planet's motion and break the mass-inclination degeneracy for this non-transiting planet via deep combined flux observations of the star and the planet. In total, seven epochs of Keck NIRSPEC $L$ band observations, three epochs of Keck NIRSPEC short wavelength $K$ band observations, and three epochs of Keck NIRSPEC long wavelength $K$ band observations of the ups~And~system were obtained. We perform a multi-epoch cross correlation of the full data set with an atmospheric model. We measure the radial projection of the Keplerian velocity ($K_P$ = 55 $\pm$ 9 km/s), true mass ($M_b$ = 1.7 $^{+0.33}_{-0.24}$ $M_J$), and orbital inclination \big($i_b$ = 24 $\pm$ 4$^{\circ}$\big), and determine that the planet's opacity structure is dominated by water vapor at the probed wavelengths. Dynamical simulations of the planets in the ups~And~system with these orbital elements for ups~And~b show that stable, long-term (100 Myr) orbital configurations exist. These measurements will inform future studies of the stability and evolution of the ups~And~system, as well as the atmospheric structure and composition of the hot Jupiter.