Paper

Retrieving Young Cloudy L-Dwarfs: A Nearby Planetary-Mass Companion BD+60 1417B and Its Isolated Red Twin W0047

Strassmeier, Klaus, Burningham, Ben, Merchan, Sherelyn Alejandro, Faherty, Jacqueline K, Visscher, Channon, Morley, Caroline V, Gonzales, Eileen, Griffith, Emily J, Ilyin, Ilya, Gaarn, Josefine, Vos, Johanna M, Phillips, Caprice L, Whiteford, Niall, Calamari, Emily

2024

Overview

We present an atmospheric retrieval analysis on a set of young, cloudy, red L-dwarfs -- CWISER J124332.12+600126.2 and WISEP J004701.06+680352.1 -- using the \\textit{Brewster} retrieval framework. We also present the first elemental abundance measurements of the young K-dwarf (K0) host star, BD+60 1417 using high resolution~(R = 50,000) spectra taken with PEPSI/LBT. In the complex cloudy L-dwarf regime the emergence of condensate cloud species complicates retrieval analysis when only near-infrared data is available. We find that for both L dwarfs in this work, despite testing three different thermal profile parameterizations we are unable to constrain reliable abundance measurements and thus the C/O ratio. While we can not conclude what the abundances are, we can conclude that the data strongly favor a cloud model over a cloudless model. We note that the difficulty in retrieval constraints persists regardless of the signal to noise of the data examined (S/N \\(\\sim\\) 10 for CWISER J124332.12+600126.2 and~40 for WISEP J004701.06+680352.1). The results presented in this work provide valuable lessons about retrieving young, low-surface gravity, cloudy L-dwarfs. This work provides continued evidence of missing information in models and the crucial need for JWST to guide and inform retrieval analysis in this regime.

• Publisher: Cornell University Library, arXiv.org
• Subject: Abundance / Infrared analysis / Retrieval