Moderately misaligned orbit of the warm sub-Saturn HD 332231 b

Abstract

Measurements of exoplanetary orbital obliquity angles for different classes of planets are an essential tool in testing various planet formation theories. Measurements for those transiting planets on relatively large orbital periods (P > 10 d) present a rather difficult observational challenge. Here we present the obliquity measurement for the warm sub-Saturn planet HD 332231 b, which was discovered through Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite photometry of sectors 14 and 15, on a relatively large orbital period (18.7 d). Through a joint analysis of previously obtained spectroscopic data and our newly obtained CARMENES transit observations, we estimated the spin-orbit misalignment angle, λ, to be −42.0−10.6+11.3 deg, which challenges Laplacian ideals of planet formation. Through the addition of these new radial velocity data points obtained with CARMENES, we also derived marginal improvements on other orbital and bulk parameters for the planet, as compared to previously published values. We showed the robustness of the obliquity measurement through model comparison with an aligned orbit. Finally, we demonstrated the inability of the obtained data to probe any possible extended atmosphere of the planet, due to a lack of precision, and place the atmosphere in the context of a parameter detection space. © ESO 2022. ; CARMENES is an instrument at the Centro Astronómico Hispano-Alemán (CAHA) at Calar Alto (Almería, Spain), operated jointly by the Junta de Andalucía and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (CSIC). The authors wish to express their sincere thanks to all members of the Calar Alto staff for their expert support of the instrument and telescope operation. We acknowledge financial support from the Agencia Estatal de Investigación of the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades through projects Ref. PID2019-110689RB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and the Centre of Excellence "Severo Ochoa" award to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (SEV-2017-0709). We also acknowledge the use of the ExoAtmospheres database during the preparation of this work and thank the team at the IAC for their excellent work preparing such a useful database. E.S. acknowledges support from ANID - Millennium Science Initiative - ICN12_009. K.M. acknowledges support from the Excellence Cluster ORIGINS, which is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy - EXC-2094 - 390783311. A.S.L. acknowledges funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 694513. Beside those explicitly mentioned in the manuscript, throughout this work the following python packages have been used: astropy (Astropy Collaboration 2018), corner (Foreman-Mackey 2016), matplotlib (Hunter 2007), NumPy (Harris et al. 2020), pandas (Pandas development team 2020), PyMC (Salvatier et al. 2016) and SciPy (Virtanen et al. 2020). ; Peer reviewed