Probing the atmosphere of WASP-69 b with low- and high-resolution transmission spectroscopy

Abstract

Consideration of both low- and high-resolution transmission spectroscopy is key for obtaining a comprehensive picture of exoplanet atmospheres. In studies of transmission spectra, the continuum information is well established with low-resolution spectra, while the shapes of individual lines are best constrained with high-resolution observations. In this work, we aim to merge high- with low-resolution transmission spectroscopy to place tighter constraints on physical parameters of the atmospheres. We present the analysis of three primary transits of WASP-69 b in the visible (VIS) channel of the CARMENES instrument and perform a combined low- and high-resolution analysis using additional data from HARPS-N, OSIRIS/GTC, and WFC3/HST already available in the literature. We investigate the Na I D-1 and D-2 doublet, H alpha, the Ca II infra-red triplet (IRT), and K I lambda 7699 angstrom lines, and we monitor the stellar photometric variability by performing long-term photometric observations with the STELLA telescope. During the first CARMENES observing night, we detected the planet Na I D-2 and D-1 lines at similar to 7 and similar to 3 sigma significance levels, respectively. We measured a D-2/D-1 intensity ratio of 2.5 +/- 0.7, which is in agreement with previous HARPS-N observations. Our modelling of WFC3 and OSIRIS data suggests strong Rayleigh scattering, solar to super-solar water abundance, and a highly muted Na feature in the atmosphere of this planet, in agreement with previous investigations of this target. We use the continuum information retrieved from the low-resolution spectroscopy as a prior to break the degeneracy between the Na abundance, reference pressure, and thermosphere temperature for the high-resolution spectroscopic analysis. We fit the Na I D-1 and D-2 lines individually and find that the posterior distributions of the model parameters agree with each other within 1 sigma. Our results suggest that local thermodynamic equilibrium processes can explain the observed D-2/D-1 ratio because the presence of haze opacity mutes the absorption features.