A new method for probing the atmospheres of transiting exoplanets

Although atmospheric transmission spectroscopy of HD 209458b with the Hubble Space Telescope has been very successful, so far no atmospheric absorption features have been detected from the ground. Here we present a new method for probing the atmospheres of transiting exoplanets which may be more suitable for ground-based observations, making use of the Rossiter effect. During a transit, an exoplanet sequentially blocks off light from the approaching and receding parts of the rotating star, causing an artificial radial velocity wobble. The amplitude of this signal is directly proportional to the effective size of the transiting object, and the wavelength dependence of this effect can reveal atmospheric absorption features, in a similar way as with transmission spectroscopy. The advantage of this method over conventional atmospheric transmission spectroscopy is that it does not rely on accurate photometric comparisons of observations on and off transit, but instead depends on the relative velocity shifts of individual stellar absorption lines within the same on-transit spectra. We used an archival data set from the UV-Visual Echelle Spectrograph on the Very Large Telescope to apply this method to HD 209458. The amplitude of the Rossiter effect is shown to be 1.7 +1.1 -1.2 m s -1 higher in the Sodium D lines than in the weighted average of all other absorption lines in the observed wavelength range, corresponding to an increment of 4.3 ± 3 per cent (1.4σ). The uncertainty in this measurement compares to a photometric accuracy of 5 x 10 -4 for conventional atmospheric transmission spectroscopy, more than an order of magnitude higher than previous attempts using ground-based telescopes. Observations specifically designed for this method could increase the accuracy further by a factor of 2-3.