Program: GS-2022A-Q-328

Stellar elemental abundance measurements give us insight into the inventory of planetary building blocks and allow us to put meaningful constraints on the composition of rocky planet interiors. However, persistent discrepancies between stellar atmosphere models and spectroscopic observations of M dwarfs make it impossible to derive accurate elemental abundances, which then leads to a biased and often incorrect interpretation of rocky planet interiors around M dwarfs. Our aim is to remedy this issue by empirically calibrating M dwarf elemental abundance measurements by obtaining high-resolution near-IR spectra of both components of visual FGK-M dwarf binaries. Because FGK spectra do not suffer the same model inconsistencies as the M dwarfs do, we will derive reliable FGK abundances to empirically calibrate the M dwarf abundances, thus providing a new window into the detailed chemical compositions of rocky exoplanets orbiting M dwarfs. We propose to target 21 visual FGK-M dwarf binaries with IGRINS to derive the necessary calibration. The calibrations derived from our dataset will act as a valuable tool for the community in future work to constrain the interior composition of rocky exoplanets transiting field M dwarfs.