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Exoplanet Volatile Carbon Content as a Natural Pathway for Haze Formation

  • Authors: Edwin A. Bergin, Eliza M.-R. Kempton, Marc Hirschmann, Sandra T. Bastelberger, D. J. Teal, Geoffrey A. Blake, Fred J. Ciesla, Jie Li

Edwin A. Bergin et al 2023 The Astrophysical Journal Letters 949 .

  • Provider: AAS Journals

Caption: Figure 4.

Changes in transmission spectra for increasing enhancement of atmospheric oxygen by factors of 1–300× from top to bottom. The full spectra (orange lines) are compared to “hazeless” spectra for which the opacity contribution of haze was removed from the calculation (teal lines), revealing the otherwise muted molecular features of the gas-phase species. The transparent colored lines represent the full-resolution transmission spectra output by Exo-Transmit (spectral resolution of R = 1000), while the opaque, thick lines are smoothed for ease of visualization. The baseline case (1×) corresponds to Figure 3. The bulk composition of the atmosphere changes with increasing oxidation, and new molecular features of H2O and CO2 become apparent as their abundance increases. Haze dominates the transmission spectrum until oxygen has been added to the atmosphere at ∼50× its baseline value. At an oxygen enhancement of 300×, the production of haze is effectively suppressed, and its impact on the transmission spectrum is negligible. We note that the feature labeled as “Haze” near 7 μm is a spectroscopic feature resulting in a sharp rise in the extinction coefficient at that wavelength in the Haze model.

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