A Precise Carbon and Oxygen Abundance Determination in a Hot Jupiter Atmosphere

Abstract

\n The origins of gas giant planets orbiting close to their host stars (``hot Jupiters ) remain a mystery despite more than a quarter-century of study (Fortney et al. 2021). The atmospheric compositions of these planets are highly sought after to provide insight to their formation location in protoplanetary disks, how they migrated to be so close to their host stars, and the relative role of solid versus gas accretion during their assembly (Madhusudhan 2019). However, simultaneous, bounded constraints on both carbon and oxygen abundances, which are key for understanding giant planet formation (Oeberg et al. 2011, Mordasini et al. 2016, Madhusudhan et al. 2017,Cridland et al. 2016), have been elusive (Kreidberg et al. 2014,Wakeford et al. 2018,Pelletier et al. 2021). Here, we report precise abundance measurements of both water and carbon monoxide in a hot Jupiter atmosphere via ground-based, high resolution spectroscopy. From these constraints on the primary carbon- and oxygen-bearing molecules, paired with upper limits on other minor volatile elemental carriers, we are able to derive the atmospheric elemental metal enrichment (metallicity) and the carbon-to-oxygen ratio (C/O). The inferred atmospheric metallicity is slightly sub-stellar (-0.48$+0.15/-0.13) and the C/O is consistent with stellar (0.59 ±0.08). The former is suggestive of a metal-depleted atmosphere relative to expectations based on extrapolation from the solar system, indicative of a greater partitioning of metals within the core vs the atmosphere. The C/O constraint rules out gas-dominated accretion followed by disk free migration. Taken together in the context of past inferences, these results point to a diversity of planetary atmospheric compositions in addition to the observed diversity of planetary system architectures.