Detection of Rubidium and Samarium in the Atmosphere of the Ultrahot Jupiter MASCARA-4b

Abstract

Ultrahot Jupiters (UHJs) possess the most extreme environments among various types of exoplanets, making them ideal laboratories to study the chemical composition and kinetics properties of exoplanet atmosphere with high-resolution spectroscopy. It has the advantage of resolving the tiny Doppler shift and weak signal from exoplanet atmosphere and has helped to detect dozens of heavy elements in UHJs including KELT-9b, WASP-76b, and WASP-121b. MASCARA-4b is a 2.8 days UHJ with an equilibrium temperature of ∼2250 K, which is expected to contain heavy elements detectable with the Very Large Telescope (VLT). In this letter, we present a survey of atoms/ions in the atmosphere of the MASCARA-4b, using the two VLT/ESPRESSO transits data. Cross-correlation analyses are performed on the obtained transmission spectra at each exposure with the template spectra generated by petitRADTRANS for atoms/ions from element Li to U. We confirm the previous detection of Mg, Ca, Cr, and Fe, and report the detection of Rb, Sm, Ti+, and Ba+ with peak signal-to-noise ratios (S/Ns) > 5. We report a tentative detection of Sc+, with peak S/Ns ∼ 6 but deviating from the estimated position. The most interesting discovery is the first-time detection of elements Rb and Sm in an exoplanet. Rb is an alkaline element like Na and K, while Sm is the first lanthanide series element and is by far the heaviest one detected in exoplanets. Detailed modeling and acquiring more data are required to yield abundance ratios of the heavy elements and to understand better the common presence of them in UHJ’s atmospheres.

Keywords

• Exoplanet atmospheric composition
• High resolution spectroscopy
• Exoplanet atmospheres