The atomic C/O ratio of KELT-9b

Abstract

The carbon-to-oxygen (C/O) ratio of a giant planet's atmosphere has long been theorised to hold compositional information that can be traced back to its formation history. Typically, the C/O ratio of an exoplanetary atmosphere is inferred from abundance measurements of major C- and O-bearing molecules such as CO, CO$_2$, H$_2$O, and OH. However, some exoplanets have such elevated temperatures that molecules can be nearly completely thermally dissociated at the pressure levels that observations probe, making it difficult to measure their C/O ratio via these traditional tracers. Here, rather than using molecules, we aim to retrieve the C/O ratio of KELT-9b (T$_\mathrm{eq} = 4000$K) directly from atomic C and O, which are detected in its atmosphere. We analysed two transits of KELT-9b observed with the MAROON-X high-resolution spectrograph, finding absorption cross-correlation signals from atomic C and O as well as refractory metals. From this, we inferred the vertical temperature structure, the relative proportions of volatile and refractory species, and the C/O ratio of KELT-9b using a 1D local thermodynamic equilibrium atmospheric retrieval framework applied only to spectral regions mostly unaffected by non-local thermodynamic equilibrium effects. We measure the atomic C/O ratio of the atmosphere of KELT-9b to be $0.20_{-0.07}^{+0.13}$, which is slightly lower than the stellar value of $0.38\pm0.15$ and significantly below the solar value of $0.59\pm0.07$. We otherwise confirm previous investigations of the terminator region, finding KELT-9b's atmosphere to be thermally inverted and slightly metal-rich. We measure the volatile-to-refractory ratio, a proxy for the ice-to-rock ratio, to be $1.24_{-0.78}^{+1.93}$ $\times$ solar ($[$M$_{\mathrm{vol}}$/M$_{\mathrm{ref}}]$ = $0.09_{-0.20}^{+0.19}$), which is consistent with both KELT-9 and the Sun.