Brown Dwarf Retrievals on FIRE!: Atmospheric Constraints and Lessons Learned from High Signal-to-Noise Medium Resolution Spectroscopy of a T9 Dwarf

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that medium-resolution spectroscopy significantly enhances atmospheric retrievals of brown dwarfs, providing more precise chemical and thermal constraints, but also reveals challenges like data flaws and modeling limitations.

Contribution

First application of high signal-to-noise medium-resolution (R~6000) spectral retrievals to a T9 brown dwarf, highlighting improvements and challenges over low-resolution methods.

Findings

Medium-resolution spectra improve abundance constraints by an order of magnitude.

Precise H2S abundance measurement enabled at higher spectral resolution.

Data flaws like order stitching errors can bias retrieval results.

Abstract

Brown dwarf spectra offer vital testbeds for our understanding of the chemical and physical processes that sculpt substellar atmospheres. Recently, atmospheric retrieval approaches have been applied to a number of low-resolution (R~100) spectra of brown dwarfs, yielding constraints on the abundances of chemical species and temperature structures of these atmospheres. Medium-resolution (R~1e3) spectra of brown dwarfs offer significant additional insight, as molecular features are more easily disentangled from one another and the thermal structure of the upper atmosphere is more readily probed. We present results from a GPU-based retrieval analysis of a high signal-to-noise, medium-resolution (R~6000) FIRE spectrum from 0.85-2.5 microns of a T9 dwarf. At 60x higher spectral resolution than previous brown dwarf retrievals, a number of novel challenges arise. We examine the strong effect of different opacity sources on our retrieved constraints, in particular for CH4. Furthermore, we find that flaws in the data such as errors from order stitching can greatly bias our results. We compare these results to those obtained for a R~100 spectrum of the same object, revealing how constraints on atmospheric abundances and temperatures improve by an order of magnitude or more (depending on the species) with increased spectral resolution. In particular, we precisely constrain the abundance of H2S, which is undetectable at lower spectral resolution. While these medium-resolution retrievals offer the potential of precise, stellar-like constraints on atmospheric abundances (~0.02 dex), our retrieved radius is unphysically small (R~0.50 R$_{Jup}$), indicating lingering shortcomings with our modeling framework. This work is an initial investigation into brown dwarf retrievals at medium spectral resolution, offering guidance for future ground-based studies and JWST observations of substellar objects.