The Sonora Substellar Atmosphere Models. V: A Correction to the Disequilibrium Abundance of CO2 for Sonora Elf Owl
Abstract
To aid the interpretation of observations of substellar atmospheres, Mukherjee et al. (2024) created the Sonora Elf Owl grid of model atmospheres, simulations that accounted for disequilibrium quench chemistry. However, Sonora Elf Owl did not accurately estimate CO2 quenching because the models quenched the gas with respect to the full atmosphere equilibrium, but CO2 should have instead been quenched with respect to the disequilibrium (i.e., quenched) abundance of CO. As a result, Sonora Elf Owl under-predicted the CO2 abundance by several order of magnitude in some instances, an amount that JWST is sensitive to. Here, we release version two of the Sonora Elf Owl grid which has corrected CO2 concentrations. Additionally, in version two we remove PH3 as a spectral contributor since our spectra consistently contained too much PH3 absorption. The new spectra can be found as an update to the original Zenodo postings.
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