Effect of tidal gravity and planetary rotation on the retrieved atmospheric abundances of close-in exoplanets

Most modern atmospheric retrievals adopt the simplifying assumption that the planetary atmosphere endures no planetary rotation and stellar tidal effect. However, for tidally locked close-in exoplanets, the gravitational influence of the host star and the rapid rotation of the planet can significantly modify the effective gravity, leading to changes in the atmospheric scale height and mixing ratios of molecular abundances. In this work, we develop a combined framework to include these rotation and tidal effects into a forward and retrieval model to study how they affect the molecular abundances of close-in exoplanets. We specifically apply our model to the planet WASP-12b, observed with HST, and WASP-39b, observed with JWST, and investigate how atmospheric retrieval parameters change when tidal and centrifugal corrections to gravity are included. The forward model calculation for strongly affected gravity due to tidal and rotation effects in WASP-12b shows an increment in transit depth in the range of 150-500 ppm for major molecules in the atmosphere, whereas for WASP-39b with small gravity reduction shows variations of 60- 180 ppm. The atmospheric retrievals for WASP-12b using HST and WASP-39b using JWST transmission spectra with and without effective gravity corrections show an increment in the retrieved molecular abundances. A systematic study by reducing the effective gravity by 20%, 30% and an extreme value 50% for WASP-39b shows increasing changes in the inferred log-mixing ratios of various molecules. Our results show a similar trend with non-isothermal P-T profiles, but cloudy models suppress the combined effect of rotation and tidal gravity.

Source: arXiv:2606.18100v1 - http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.18100v1 PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.18100v1 Original Link: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.18100v1