No Arabic abstract
Understanding the relationship between long-period giant planets and multiple smaller short-period planets is critical for formulating a complete picture of planet formation. This work characterizes three such systems. We present Kepler-65, a system with an eccentric (e=0.28+/-0.07) giant planet companion discovered via radial velocities (RVs) exterior to a compact, multiply-transiting system of sub-Neptune planets. We also use precision RVs to improve mass and radius constraints on two other systems with similar architectures, Kepler-25 and Kepler-68. In Kepler-68 we propose a second exterior giant planet candidate. Finally, we consider the implications of these systems for planet formation models, particularly that the moderate eccentricity in Kepler-65s exterior giant planet did not disrupt its inner system.
We combine analytical understanding of resonant dynamics in two-planet systems with machine learning techniques to train a model capable of robustly classifying stability in compact multi-planet systems over long timescales of $10^9$ orbits. Our Stability of Planetary Orbital Configurations Klassifier (SPOCK) predicts stability using physically motivated summary statistics measured in integrations of the first $10^4$ orbits, thus achieving speed-ups of up to $10^5$ over full simulations. This computationally opens up the stability constrained characterization of multi-planet systems. Our model, trained on $approx 100,000$ three-planet systems sampled at discrete resonances, generalizes both to a sample spanning a continuous period-ratio range, as well as to a large five-planet sample with qualitatively different configurations to our training dataset. Our approach significantly outperforms previous methods based on systems angular momentum deficit, chaos indicators, and parametrized fits to numerical integrations. We use SPOCK to constrain the free eccentricities between the inner and outer pairs of planets in the Kepler-431 system of three approximately Earth-sized planets to both be below 0.05. Our stability analysis provides significantly stronger eccentricity constraints than currently achievable through either radial velocity or transit duration measurements for small planets, and within a factor of a few of systems that exhibit transit timing variations (TTVs). Given that current exoplanet detection strategies now rarely allow for strong TTV constraints (Hadden et al., 2019), SPOCK enables a powerful complementary method for precisely characterizing compact multi-planet systems. We publicly release SPOCK for community use.
We calculate and analyze the distribution of period ratios observed in systems of Kepler exoplanet candidates including studies of both adjacent planet pairs and all planet pairs. These distributions account for both the geometrical bias against detecting more distant planets and the effects of incompleteness due to planets missed by the data reduction pipeline. In addition to some of the known features near first-order mean-motion resonances (MMR), there is a significant excess of planet pairs with period ratios near 2.2. The statistical significance of this feature is assessed using Monte Carlo simulation. We also investigate the distribution of period ratios near first-order MMR and compare different quantities used to measure this distribution. We find that beyond period ratios of ~2.5, the distribution of all period ratios follows a power-law with an exponent -1.26 +/- 0.05. We discuss implications that these results may have on the formation and dynamical evolution of Kepler-like planetary systems---systems of sub-Neptune/super-Earth planets with relatively short orbital periods.
In this paper we search for distant massive companions to known transiting gas giant planets that may have influenced the dynamical evolution of these systems. We present new radial velocity observations for a sample of 51 planets obtained using the Keck HIRES instrument, and find statistically significant accelerations in fifteen systems. Six of these systems have no previously reported accelerations in the published literature: HAT-P-10, HAT-P-22, HAT-P-29, HAT-P-32, WASP-10, and XO-2. We combine our radial velocity fits with Keck NIRC2 adaptive optics (AO) imaging data to place constraints on the allowed masses and orbital periods of the companions responsible for the detected accelerations. The estimated masses of the companions range between 1-500 M_Jup, with orbital semi-major axes typically between 1-75 AU. A significant majority of the companions detected by our survey are constrained to have minimum masses comparable to or larger than those of the transiting planets in these systems, making them candidates for influencing the orbital evolution of the inner gas giant. We estimate a total occurrence rate of 51 +/- 10% for companions with masses between 1-13 M_Jup and orbital semi-major axes between 1-20 AU in our sample. We find no statistically significant difference between the frequency of companions to transiting planets with misaligned or eccentric orbits and those with well-aligned, circular orbits. We combine our expanded sample of radial velocity measurements with constraints from transit and secondary eclipse observations to provide improved measurements of the physical and orbital characteristics of all of the planets included in our survey.
We derive a semi-analytic criterion for the presence of chaos in compact, eccentric multiplanet systems. Beyond a minimum semimajor-axis separation, below which the dynamics are chaotic at all eccentricities, we show that (i) the onset of chaos is determined by the overlap of two-body mean motion resonances (MMRs), like it is in two-planet systems; (ii) secular evolution causes the MMR widths to expand and contract adiabatically, so that the chaotic boundary is established where MMRs overlap at their greatest width. For closely spaced two-planet systems, a near-symmetry strongly suppresses this secular modulation, explaining why the chaotic boundaries for two-planet systems are qualitatively different from cases with more than two planets. We use these results to derive an improved angular-momentum-deficit (AMD) stability criterion, i.e., the critical system AMD below which stability should be guaranteed. This introduces an additional factor to the expression from Laskar and Petit (2017) that is exponential in the interplanetary separations, which corrects the AMD threshold toward lower eccentricities by a factor of several for tightly packed configurations. We make routines for evaluating the chaotic boundary available to the community through the open-source SPOCK package.
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission was designed to find transiting planets around bright, nearby stars. Here we present the detection and mass measurement of a small, short-period ($approx,4$,days) transiting planet around the bright ($V=7.9$), solar-type star HD 86226 (TOI-652, TIC 22221375), previously known to host a long-period ($sim$1600 days) giant planet. HD 86226c (TOI-652.01) has a radius of $2.16pm0.08$ $R_{oplus}$ and a mass of 7.25$^{+1.19}_{-1.12}$ $M_{oplus}$ based on archival and new radial velocity data. We also update the parameters of the longer-period, not-known-to-transit planet, and find it to be less eccentric and less massive than previously reported. The density of the transiting planet is $3.97$ g cm$^{-3}$, which is low enough to suggest that the planet has at least a small volatile envelope, but the mass fractions of rock, iron, and water are not well-constrained. Given the host star brightness, planet period, and location of the planet near both the ``radius gap and the ``hot Neptune desert, HD 86226c is an interesting candidate for transmission spectroscopy to further refine its composition.