Revisiting Jupiter’s deuterium fraction in the rotational ground-state line of HD at high spectral resolution

¹ Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie, Auf dem Hügel 69, 53121 Bonn, Germany
e-mail: hwiese@mpifr-bonn.mpg.de
² Max-Planck-Institut für Sonnensystemforschung, Justus-von-Liebig-Weg 3, 37077 Göttingen, Germany
³ I. Physikalisches Institut der Universität zu Köln, Zülpicher Straße 77, 50937 Köln, Germany

Received: 25 March 2024
Accepted: 26 June 2024

Abstract

The cosmic deuterium fraction, set by primordial nucleosynthesis and diminished by subsequent astration, is a valuable diagnostic tool to link the protosolar nebula to the history of star formation. However, in the present-day Solar System, the deuterium fraction in various carriers varies by more than an order of magnitude and reflects environmental conditions rather than the protosolar value. The latter is believed to be preserved in the atmospheres of the gas giant planets, yet determinations inferred from the CH₃D/CH₄ pair require a larger fractionation correction than those from HD/H₂, which are close to unity. The question of whether a stratospheric emission feature contaminates the absorption profile forming in subjacent layers was never addressed, owing to the lack of spectral resolving power. Here we report on the determination of the Jovian deuterium fraction using the rotational ground-state line of HD (J = 1–0) at λ112 μm. Employing the GREAT heterodyne spectrometer on board SOFIA, we detected the HD absorption and, thanks to the high resolving power, a weak stratospheric emission feature underneath; the former is blue-shifted with respect to the latter. The displacement is attributed to a pressure-induced line shift and reproduced by dedicated radiative-transfer modeling based on recent line-profile parameters. Using atmospheric standard models, we obtained D/H = (1.9 ± 0.4) × 10⁻⁵, which agrees with a recent measurement in Saturn’s atmosphere and with the value inferred from solar-wind measurements and meteoritic data. The result suggests that all three measurements represent bona fide protosolar D/H fractions. As a supplement and test for the consistency of the layering assumed in our model, we provide an analysis of the purely rotational J = 6–5 line of CH₄ (in the vibrational ground state, at λ 159 μm).