A seven-planet resonant chain in TRAPPIST-1

By R. Luger, M. Sestovic, Ethan Kruse, S. Grimm, B. Demory, E. Agol, É. Bolmont, D. Fabrycky, C. S. Fernandes, V. Van Grootel and 23 more. Nature Astronomy, 2017

285 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The TRAPPIST-1 system is the first transiting planet system found orbiting an ultracool dwarf star1. At least seven planets similar in radius to Earth were previously found to transit this host star2. Subsequently, TRAPPIST-1 was observed as part of the K2 mission and, with these new data, we report the measurement of an 18.77 day orbital period for the outermost transiting planet, TRAPPIST-1 h, which was previously unconstrained. This value matches our theoretical expectations based on Laplace relations3 and places TRAPPIST-1 h as the seventh member of a complex chain, with three-body resonances linking every member. We find that TRAPPIST-1 h has a radius of 0.752 R⊕ and an equilibrium temperature of 173 K. We have also measured the rotational period of the star to be 3.3 days and detected a number of flares consistent with a low-activity, middle-aged, late M dwarf. Orbital parameters for the seventh Earth-sized transiting planet around star TRAPPIST-1 are reported, along with an investigation into the complex three-body resonances linking every member of this planetary system.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0d83b93ad6d4b81bc78632cd72849f83bb1a40a9

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Citations in the corpus

Optimized transit detection algorithm to search for periodic transits of small planets (2019, background): “The well-studied TRAPPIST-1 system exhibits transits of seven terrestrial planets (Gillon et al. 2016, 2017) in a resonant chain, where the orbital periods are near-ratios of small integers (Luger et al. 2017).”
The Transit Light Source Effect: False Spectral Features and Incorrect Densities for M-dwarf Transiting Planets (2017, background): “…planets have been discovered to date, including GJ 1132b (Berta-Thompson et al. 2015), LHS 1140b (Dittmann et al. 2017), and the TRAPPIST-1 system (Gillon et al. 2016, 2017; Luger et al. 2017), an ultracool dwarf only 12 parsecs away hosting a system of seven transiting Earth-sized planets.”
Evolved Climates and Observational Discriminants for the TRAPPIST-1 Planetary System (2018, methodology): “Here we adopt the current best-fit orbital periods,radii, and masses of the TRAPPIST-1 planets (see Table 1 and Gillon et al. 2016, 2017; Luger et al. 2017b; Grimm et al. 2018).”
The Detectability and Characterization of the TRAPPIST-1 Exoplanet Atmospheres with JWST (2019, background): “This conclusion is supported by the resonant chain structure of the TRAPPIST-1 system, which suggests inward migration from more volatile-rich formation orbits (Luger et al. 2017b).”
Modeling climate diversity, tidal dynamics and the fate of volatiles on TRAPPIST-1 planets (2017, methodology): “All simulations were performed assuming a circular orbit, a choice motivated by the small value of the maximum eccentricities derived from the stability of the system (Gillon et al. 2017; Luger et al. 2017).”
Frequent Flaring in the TRAPPIST-1 System—Unsuited for Life? (2017, background): “The most significant peak in the light curve is at f = 0.303469 days−1, P1 = 3.295 ± 0.003 days, as also found by Luger et al. (2017).”
Identifying Exoplanets with Deep Learning: A Five-planet Resonant Chain around Kepler-80 and an Eighth Planet around Kepler-90 (2017, methodology): “Following Luger et al. (2017), we calculated the orbital periods of putative additional outer planets in the Kepler-80 system under the assumption that they happened to be in a three-body resonance with Kepler-80 b and c.”