Exoplanets and brown dwarfs have clouds and hazes that scatter self-luminous emission and produce a polarized signal. This signature is complimentary to direct spectroscopy, as it breaks degeneracies in cloud morphology and cloud grain size (Stolker et al., 2018; Mukherjee et al. 2021) that state-of-the-art forward modeling has yet to disentangle (e.g., HIP 21152 B cloud properties in Franson et al. 2023a). This proposal seeks three half nights for a multi-wavelength polarimetric study of three substellar companions: AF Lep B, HIP 21152 B, and HD 984 B. With detections, or upper limits at the level of 0.5−0.1% disk-integrated degree of linear polarization on these objects, we will compare the polarized signal to model grids and individual high resolution models to better understand the large scale cloud structures and place constraints on rotation speeds. The convective physics that produces large scale cloud features (e.g., Jupiter’s bands and spots) while thought to depend on temperature, is still largely unknown (Zhang et al., 2014) and this study provides 3 objects (spanning ∼ 800-2730 K) that increase our understanding.
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