ERIS/SPIFFIER at Short Angular Separation: Present Day Detection and Characterisation Results of the HD 206893 System
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Context. Detection and characterisation of gas giants and brown dwarfs via direct imaging spectroscopy provides a unique window into planetary system formation and architecture. Atmospheric elemental abundances and the carbon-to-oxygen (C/O) help retracing the history of giant exoplanets, which is key to explaining their diversity in mass, radius, and orbital separation, and to linking high-mass planet formation with brown dwarf formation. Aims. We aim to present results of the HD 206893 planetary system from K-band (R ≈ 11 000) with the integral field spectrograph ERIS/SPIFFIER. We assess the feasibility of constraining atmospheric chemistry—specifically the C/O ratio—for companions forming in chemically complex regions near the H2O iceline, where observational challenges are most severe. Methods. The data was processed using the latest ERIS reduction pipelines, Angular Differential Imaging, and Molecular Mapping to efficiently remove the stellar residuals at very close-in angular separation. We use robust characterisation frameworks for molecular detection and atmospheric characterisation. Results. We report our detection and characterisation results for HD 206893 system. We present ongoing work, and discuss individual molecular detections. Conclusions. These observations highlight detection capabilities and competitiveness of ERIS to probe giant exoplanet atmospheres at cutting-edge angular separations and inner regions of (past) protoplanetary disks. Such results have key implications towards detection and characterisation of smaller, closer-in planets with integral field spectrographs (METIS, HARMONI, MICADO and PCS) of the future ELT.
Language: English
Subfield: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7172382995