Ariel stellar characterisation III. Fast rotators and new FGK stars in the Ariel Mission Candidate Sample

TL;DR

This study develops a spectral synthesis methodology to homogeneously characterize fast and slow-rotating FGK stars in the Ariel Mission Candidate Sample, significantly expanding the dataset for better understanding of stellar and planetary correlations.

Contribution

It introduces a consistent spectral synthesis approach for FGK stars, compares it with previous methods, and applies it to nearly double the sample size for the Ariel mission.

Findings

Excellent agreement between spectral synthesis and previous EW analysis methods.

Confirmed correlations between stellar mass, metallicity, and planetary properties.

Expanded the sample to 353 stars for comprehensive stellar and planetary analysis.

Abstract

The next mission dedicated to the study of planetary atmospheres is the Ariel space mission, planned for launch in 2029, which will observe a variety of planetary systems belonging to different classes around stars with spectral types from M to A. To optimise the scientific outcome of the mission, such stars need to be homogeneously characterised beforehand. In this work, we focus on a methodology based on spectral synthesis for the characterisation of FGK-type stars from the Ariel Tier 1 Mission Candidate Sample (MCS) which exhibit fast rotation. In addition, we analyse slow-rotating FGK-type stars, with either new observations or archival spectra available, consistently as in our previous work using the equivalent width (EW) analysis. To ensure consistency between our methods, we re-analysed a sample of FGK-type stars with the spectral synthesis method and compared it to our previous work. The results of our analysis show excellent agreement with the previous set of derived parameters. We also computed their orbital parameters establishing whether they belong to the Galactic thin or thick discs. With the current set of stellar parameters, we almost double the analysed hosts in the Ariel MCS to 353 stars in total. Using our homogeneous set of stellar parameters, we studied the correlations between stellar and planetary properties for the Ariel MCS analysed so far. We confirmed a close relationship between stellar mass (up to 1.8 solar masses) and giant planet radius, with more inflated planets at lower metallicity. We confirm that giant planets are more frequent around more metal-rich stars that belong to the thin disc, while lower-mass planets are also found in more metal-poor environments, and are more frequent than giant planets in the thick disc as also seen in other works in the literature.