A New Planet around an M Dwarf: Revealing a Correlation between Exoplanets and Stellar Mass

By J. Johnson, R. P. Butler, G. Marcy, Debra A. Fischer, S. Steven, Vogt, Jason T. Wright, K. Peek. 2007

273 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report precise Doppler measurements of GJ 317 (M3.5 V) that reveal the presence of a planet with a minimum mass MP sin i = 1.2 MJup in an eccentric, 692.9 day orbit. GJ 317 is only the third M dwarf with a Doppler-detected Jovian planet. The residuals to a single-Keplerian fit show evidence of a possible second orbital companion. The inclusion of a second Jupiter-mass planet (P ≈ 2700 days, MP sin i = 0.83 MJup) decreases from 2.02 to 1.23, and reduces the rms from 12.5 to 6.32 m s-1. A false-alarm test yields a 1.1% probability that the curvature in the residuals of the single-planet fit is due to random fluctuations, lending additional credibility to the two-planet model. However, our data only marginally constrain a two-planet fit, and further monitoring is necessary to fully characterize the properties of the second companion. To study the effect of stellar mass on giant planet occurrence, we measure the fraction of stars with planets in three mass bins comprised of our samples of M Dwarfs, solar-mass stars, and intermediate-mass subgiants. We find a positive correlation between stellar mass and the occurrence rate of Jovian planets within 2.5 AU. Low-mass K and M stars have a 1.8% ± 1.0% planet occurrence rate compared to 4.2% ± 0.7% for solar-mass stars and 8.9% ± 2.9% for the higher mass subgiants. This result indicates that the former F- and A-type stars with M* ≥ 1.3 M☉ in our sample are nearly 5 times more likely than the M dwarfs to harbor a giant planet. Our analysis shows that the correlation between Jovian planet occurrence and stellar mass exists even after correcting for the effects of stellar metallicity.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/401588ead0544d7e78b4265baf6605ee563df235

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. D. Charbonneau
2. J. Johnson
3. Timothy Morton
4. E. Gaidos
5. Andrew W. Howard
6. M. Perryman
7. G. Marcy
8. J. Winn

In Instrumentation

1. D. Charbonneau
2. J. Johnson
3. Timothy Morton
4. E. Gaidos
5. Andrew W. Howard
6. G. Marcy
7. J. Winn
8. A. Mann

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

1. Timothy Morton
2. J. Johnson
3. E. Gaidos
4. G. Marcy
5. S. Lépine
6. D. Charbonneau
7. H. Isaacson
8. Debra A. Fischer

Citations in the corpus

• A Low-Mass Planet with a Possible Sub-Stellar-Mass Host in Microlensing Event MOA-2007-BLG-192 (2008, background): “Gas giant planets have been found in orbit around stars of all these types (Butler et al. 2006; Sato et al. 2007; Johnson et al. 2007; Niedzielski et al. 2007; Lovis & Mayor 2007), but they appear to be increasingly rare in orbit around low-mass stars.”
• PALM-3000: EXOPLANET ADAPTIVE OPTICS FOR THE 5 m HALE TELESCOPE (2013, background): “Motivated by the correlation between planet frequency and the mass of the host star (Johnson et al. 2007), the survey will target approximately 220 stellar systems having A and F-type stars, a population expected to host exoplanets 5 times as often as their lower mass counterparts.”
• THE GEMINI/NICI PLANET-FINDING CAMPAIGN: THE FREQUENCY OF PLANETS AROUND YOUNG MOVING GROUP STARS (2013, background): “Indeed, Johnson et al. (2007, 2010) find that >1 MJup radial velocity planets are quite rare around M stars at semi-major axes <5 AU.”
• The Occurrence and Architecture of Exoplanetary Systems (2014, background): “One secure result is that they have fewer giant planets with P <∼ 1 yr than FGK dwarfs (Butler et al. 2004, Endl et al. 2006, Johnson et al. 2007, Bonfils et al. 2013).”
• SWEET-Cat: A catalogue of parameters for Stars With ExoplanETs - I. New atmospheric parameters and masses for 48 stars with planets (2013, background): “The most productive radial velocity planet search surveys concentrated their efforts on the search for planets around solar-type, FGK dwarfs or sub-giants (for some examples see e.g. Udry et al. 2000; Mayor et al. 2003; Marcy et al. 2005; Johnson et al. 2007b).”
• THE OCCURRENCE RATE OF SMALL PLANETS AROUND SMALL STARS (2013, result): “…low occurrence rate of giant planets is consistent with previous estimates of the giant planet occurrence rate around cool stars (Butler et al. 2004; Bonfils et al. 2006; Butler et al. 2006; Endl et al. 2006; Johnson et al. 2007; Cumming et al. 2008; Bonfils et al. 2011; Howard et al. 2012).”
• ALMA SURVEY OF LUPUS PROTOPLANETARY DISKS. I. DUST AND GAS MASSES (2016, background): “…and M∗ in Lupus supports the suggestion by Andrews et al. (2013) that such a relation fundamentally explains the correlation between giant planet frequency and host star mass identified in the exoplanet population (Endl et al. 2006; Johnson et al. 2007; Bonfils et al. 2013; Bowler et al. 2010).”
• THE CALIFORNIA PLANET SURVEY. I. FOUR NEW GIANT EXOPLANETS (2010, background): “Remarkably, the exoplanets exhibit a sharp rise in occurrence beyond 1AU (Johnson et al. 2007b; Cumming et al. 2008), indicating a great population of giant planets resides there.”
• The Habitability of Planets Orbiting M-dwarf Stars (2016, background): “Before M dwarfs were revealed to host small planets (< 4 R⊕) in abundance (which we describe in detail in Section 3.5), their dearth of gas giants established them as comparatively poor planet hosts (Laws et al., 2003; Johnson et al., 2007; Lovis & Mayor, 2007; Johnson et al., 2010a).”
• Planet Formation around Stars of Various Masses: The Snow Line and the Frequency of Giant Planets (2007, background): “Though sample numbers are small, it appears that observable gas giant frequency increases with stellar mass across a wide range of host masses (Johnson et al. 2007a).”
• The Keck Planet Search: Detectability and the Minimum Mass and Orbital Period Distribution of Extrasolar Planets (2008, background): “However, several recent papers have pointed out that the planet occurrence rate around M dwarfs appears to be several times lower than around F, G and K stars (Butler et al. 2004b, 2006b; Endl et al. 2006; Johnson et al. 2007).”
• FUNDAMENTAL PROPERTIES OF KEPLER PLANET-CANDIDATE HOST STARS USING ASTEROSEISMOLOGY (2013, unknown): “…surveys have yielded two important correlations: gas giant planets occur more frequently around stars of high metallicity (Gonzalez 1997; Santos et al. 2004; Fischer & Valenti 2005) and around more massive stars (Laws et al. 2003; Johnson et al. 2007; Lovis & Mayor 2007; Johnson et al. 2010).”
• THE NIRSPEC ULTRACOOL DWARF RADIAL VELOCITY SURVEY (2010, methodology): “The analyses of Cumming et al. (2008) and Johnson et al. (2007) both indicate that the overall rate of occurrence of planets decreases with stellar mass, with the rate of planets orbiting M stars being down by a factor of ∼7 compared to Sun-like stars.”
• Imaging Extrasolar Giant Planets (2016, background): “…there are hints of a higher giant planet occurrence rate around massive stars analogous to the well-established correlation at small separations (Johnson et al. 2007; Lovis & Mayor 2007; Johnson et al. 2010; Bowler et al. 2010b), this trend is not yet statistically significant at wide orbital…”
• THE MASS DEPENDENCE BETWEEN PROTOPLANETARY DISKS AND THEIR STELLAR HOSTS (2013, background): “The most notable example of the latter is the correlation between the giant planet frequency and stellar host mass (M∗) noted by Johnson et al. (2007), which was predicted theoretically in planet formation models that implicitly assumed there is a fundamental scaling relationship between Md and M∗…”
• PLANETS AROUND LOW-MASS STARS (PALMS). IV. THE OUTER ARCHITECTURE OF M DWARF PLANETARY SYSTEMS (2014, background): “This well-established trend between planet occurrence rate and stellar host mass (Butler et al. 2004; Endl et al. 2006; Butler et al. 2006; Johnson et al. 2007; Lovis & Mayor 2007; Cumming et al. 2008; Bowler et al. 2010; Bonfils et al. 2013; Gaidos et al. 2013) lends support to the core accretion…”
• AN ALL-SKY CATALOG OF BRIGHT M DWARFS (2011, methodology): “Stars as faint asV = 12 are routinely monitored using the High Resolution Spectrometer (HIRES) on the 10 m Keck I Telescope, e.g. Johnson et al. (2007, 2010b), and fainter but highly meritorious stars with transiting planets, e.g. GJ 1214 (Charbonneau et al. 2009), have been observed.”