Orbital Perturbations of Transiting Planets: A Possible Method to Measure Stellar Quadrupoles and to Detect Earth-Mass Planets

By J. Miralda-Escudé. 2001

212 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The recent discovery of a planetary transit in the star HD 209458, and the subsequent highly precise observation of the transit light curve with Hubble Space Telescope, is encouraging to search for any phenomena that might induce small changes in the light curve. Here we consider the effect of the quadrupole moment of the parent star and of a possible second planet perturbing the orbit of the transiting planet. Both of these cause a precession of the orbital plane and of the periastron of the planet, which result in a long-term variation of the duration and the period of the transits. For a transiting planet at 0.05 AU, either a quadrupole moment similar to that of the Sun or the gravitational tug from an Earth-like planet on an orbit of semimajor axis ~0.2 AU and a relative inclination near the optimal 45° would cause a transit duration time derivative of ~1 s yr-1.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/768e6e92b7a8cde0b3b789f2ae33aab1ced033e9

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Citations in the corpus

Using Stellar Limb-Darkening to Refine the Properties of HD 209458b (2006, background): “If the eccentricity of HD 209458b is in fact being pumped up by interactions with a second planet, Miralda-Escudé (2002) Holman &Murray (2005) and Agol et al. (2005) show that changes in the eccentricity and other orbital parameters of the planet will produce short term oscillations in the timing…”
Analytic Approximations for Transit Light-Curve Observables, Uncertainties, and Covariances (2008, background): “Additional planets in the system may be detected through gradual changes in the orbital parameters of the transiting planet (Miralda-Escudé 2002, Heyl & Gladman 2007), or from a pattern of anomalies in a 1Department of Physics, and Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Massachusetts…”
Transits and Occultations (2010, background): “Longer-term orbital perturbations should also be measurable, due to additional bodies (Miralda-Escudé 2002) or relativistic precession (Jordán & Bakos 2008, Pál & Kocsis 2008).”
DHP Framework: Digital Health Passports Using Blockchain - Use case on international tourism during the COVID-19 pandemic (2004, background): “Miralda-Escudé (2002) showed that the maximum deviation for e≪ 1 is given by δt = eP π (35) and the timing variations vary with a period that is equal to the period of precession.”
The Apparently Decaying Orbit of WASP-12b (2017, background): “Another unfulfilled prediction is that the orbits of hot Jupiters should be apsidally precessing on a timescale of decades (Miralda-Escudé 2002; Heyl & Gladman 2007; Pál & Kocsis 2008; Jordán & Bakos 2008), as long as the orbits are at least slightly eccentric.”
The Transit Light Curve Project. V. System Parameters and Stellar Rotation Period of HD 189733 (2006, background): “We also seek to measure or bound any variations in the transit times and light-curve shapes that would be caused by the influence of additional bodies in the system (Miralda-Escudé 2002; Agol et al. 2005; Holman & Murray 2005).”
TrES-2: The First Transiting Planet in the Kepler Field (2006, background): “Such variations are predicted (Miralda-Escude´ 2002) to occur as a result of either additional planets, or the stellar quadrupole moment.”
KEPLER-18b, c, AND d: A SYSTEM OF THREE PLANETS CONFIRMED BY TRANSIT TIMING VARIATIONS, LIGHT CURVE VALIDATION, WARM-SPITZER PHOTOMETRY, AND RADIAL VELOCITY MEASUREMENTS (2011, methodology): “We can use the 3σ upper limits on |∆i/∆E| of [37, 70, 33]×10−4 degrees per epoch for Kepler-18b, c, and d to place limits on their mutual inclination (Miralda-Escudé 2002).”