The Sonora Substellar Atmosphere Models. II. Cholla: A Grid of Cloud-free, Solar Metallicity Models in Chemical Disequilibrium for the JWST Era

TL;DR

This paper introduces a grid of cloud-free, solar metallicity atmospheric models for brown dwarfs and giant exoplanets, incorporating disequilibrium chemistry to aid in interpreting JWST observations.

Contribution

It presents a new set of atmospheric models covering a range of temperatures, gravities, and mixing parameters, emphasizing disequilibrium effects for the JWST era.

Findings

Models show significant impact of disequilibrium chemistry on molecular abundances.

Comparison with observations highlights the importance of disequilibrium in T dwarf atmospheres.

Models inform on the detectability of key molecules with JWST.

Abstract

Exoplanet and brown dwarf atmospheres commonly show signs of disequilibrium chemistry. In the James Webb Space Telescope era high resolution spectra of directly imaged exoplanets will allow the characterization of their atmospheres in more detail, and allow systematic tests for the presence of chemical species that deviate from thermochemical equilibrium in these atmospheres. Constraining the presence of disequilibrium chemistry in these atmospheres as a function of parameters such as their effective temperature and surface gravity will allow us to place better constrains in the physics governing these atmospheres. This paper is part of a series of works presenting the Sonora grid of atmosphere models (Marley et al 2021, Morley et al in prep.). In this paper we present a grid of cloud-free, solar metallicity atmospheres for brown dwarfs and wide separation giant planets with key molecular species such as CH4, H2O, CO and NH3 in disequilibrium. Our grid covers atmospheres with Teff~[500 K,1300 K], logg~[3.0,5.5] (cgs) and an eddy diffusion parameter of logKzz=2, 4 and 7 (cgs). We study the effect of different parameters within the grid on the temperature and composition profiles of our atmospheres. We discuss their effect on the near-infrared colors of our model atmospheres and the detectability of CH4, H2O, CO and NH3 using the JWST. We compare our models against existing MKO and Spitzer observations of brown dwarfs and verify the importance of disequilibrium chemistry for T dwarf atmospheres. Finally, we discuss how our models can help constrain the vertical structure and chemical composition of these atmospheres.