Sodium Detected in HD 189733b's Atmosphere

Spectrally resolved detection of sodium in the atmosphere of HD189733b with the HARPS spectrograph

Authors:

Wyttenbach et al

Abstract:

Atmospheric properties of exoplanets can be constrained with transit spectroscopy. The signature of atomic sodium NaI, known to be present above the clouds, is a powerful probe of the upper atmosphere, where it can be best detected and characterized at high spectral resolution. Our goal is to obtain a high-resolution transit spectrum of HD189733b in the region around the resonance doublet of NaI at 589 nm, to characterize the absorption signature previously detected from space at low resolution. We analyze archival transit data of HD189733b obtained with the HARPS spectrograph. We retrieve the transit spectrum and light curve of the planet, implementing corrections for telluric contamination and planetary orbital motion. We spectrally resolve the NaI D doublet and measure line contrasts of 0.64±0.07% (D2) and 0.40±0.07% (D1) and FWHMs of $0.52\pm0.08~\AA$. This corresponds to a detection at the 10-σ level of excess of absorption of 0.32±0.03% in a passband of $2\times0.75\ \AA$ centered on each line. We derive temperatures of 2600±600 K and 3270±330 K at altitudes of 9800±2800 km and 12700±2600 km in the NaI D1 and D2 line cores, respectively. We measure a temperature gradient of ∼0.2 K km−1 from comparison with theoretical models. We also detect a blueshift of $0.16\pm0.04\ \AA$ (4 σ) in the line positions. This blueshift may be due to winds blowing at 8±2 km s−1 in the upper layers of the atmosphere. We demonstrate the relevance of studying exoplanet atmospheres with high-resolution spectrographs mounted on 4-meter-class telescopes. Our results pave the way towards in-depth characterization of physical conditions in the atmospheres of many exoplanetary systems with future spectrographs such as ESPRESSO on the VLT or HiReS and METIS on the E-ELT.