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Detecting Magnetic Fields in Exoplanets with Spectropolarimetry of the Helium Line at 1083 nm

The magnetic fields of the solar system’s planets provide valuable insights into their interiors and can have dramatic consequences for the evolution of their atmospheres and interaction with the solar wind. However, we have little direct knowledge of magnetic fields in exoplanets. Here we present a method for detecting magnetic fields in the atmospheres of close-in exoplanets based on spectropolarimetric transit observations at the wavelength of the helium line at 1083 nm. This methodology has been successfully applied for exploring magnetic fields in solar coronal filaments. Strong absorption signatures (transit depths on the order of a few percent) in the 1083 nm line have recently been observed for several close-in exoplanets. We show that in the conditions in these escaping atmospheres, metastable helium atoms should be optically pumped by the starlight and, for field strengths more than a few × 10−4 G, should align with the magnetic field. This results in linearly polarized absorption at 1083 nm that traces the field direction (the Hanle effect), which we explore by both analytic computation and the Hazel numerical code. The linear polarization ranges from ∼10−3 in optimistic cases down to a few × 10−5 for particularly unfavorable cases, with very weak dependence on field strength. The line-of-sight component of the field results in a slight circular polarization (the Zeeman effect), also reaching . We discuss the detectability of these signals with current (SPIRou) and future (Extremely Large Telescope) high-resolution infrared spectropolarimeters, and we briefly comment on possible sources of astrophysical contamination.