Dearth of short-period Neptunian exoplanets - a desert in period-mass and period-radius planes

By T. Mazeh, T. Holczer, S. Faigler. 2016

222 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A few studies have reported a significant dearth of exoplanets with Neptune mass and radius with orbital periods below $2$--$4$ d. This cannot be explained by observational biases because many Neptunian planets with longer orbital periods have been detected. The existence of this desert is similar to the appearance of the so-called brown-dwarf desert that suggests different formation mechanisms of planets and stellar companions with short orbital periods. Similarly, the Neptunian desert might indicate different mechanisms of formation and evolution for hot Jupiters and short-period super-Earths. We here follow a previous study and examine the location and shape of the desert in both the period-mass and period-radius planes, using the currently available large samples of planets. The desert in the period-mass plane has a relatively sharp upper edge, with a planetary mass that is inversely proportional to the planetary orbital period, while the lower, somewhat blurred, boundary is located along masses that are apparently linearly proportional to the period. The desert in the period-radius plane of the transiting planets is less clear. It seems as if the radius along the upper boundary is inversely proportional to the period to the power of one-third, while the lower boundary shows a radius that is proportional to the period to the power of two-thirds. The combination of the two upper bounds of the desert, in the period-mass and period-radius planes, yields a planetary mass-radius relation of $R_{\rm p}/R_{\rm Jup}\simeq (1.2\pm0.3)(M_{\rm p}/M_{\rm Jup})^{0.27\pm0.11}\,$ for $ 0.1\lesssim M_{\rm p}/M_{\rm Jup}\lesssim 1$. The derived shape of the desert, which might extend up to periods of $5$--$10$ d, could shed some light on the formation and evolution of close-in planets.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8bcfcbeb27daa1965eb8518b8cec7f8927ec9c96

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

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Citations in the corpus

• Atmospheric Escape and the Evolution of Close-In Exoplanets (2018, background): “Mazeh et al. (2016) further showed that the sub-Jovian desert boundaries were a function of period.”
• IN SITU FORMATION AND DYNAMICAL EVOLUTION OF HOT JUPITER SYSTEMS (2015, background): “Moreover, the theory that we outline here does not provide an immediate explanation for a slope in the upper boundary traced by hot Jupiters in the mass period plane, as discussed in detail by Mazeh et al. (2016).”
• The California-Kepler Survey. IV. Metal-rich Stars Host a Greater Diversity of Planets (2017, background): “This triangular “Hot Planet Desert” has been noted by Mazeh et al. (2016) and Dong et al. (2017) and is thought to be due to photo-evaporative envelope stripping.”
• The California-Kepler Survey. VII. Precise Planet Radii Leveraging Gaia DR2 Reveal the Stellar Mass Dependence of the Planet Radius Gap (2018, background): “Previous studies have noted a desert of highly irradiated subNeptune planets (see, e.g., Lundkvist et al. 2016 and Mazeh et al. 2016).”
• Compositional Imprints in Density–Distance–Time: A Rocky Composition for Close-in Low-mass Exoplanets from the Location of the Valley of Evaporation (2017, background): “Indeed, there is a desert in the observed mass-distance diagram centered at about 60 M⊕ and a ≈ 0.03 AU (e.g., Kurokawa & Nakamoto 2014; Mazeh et al. 2016).”
• The California-Kepler Survey. III. A Gap in the Radius Distribution of Small Planets (2017, unknown): “This feature has been previously observed (e.g., Howard et al. 2012; Mazeh et al. 2016; Lundkvist et al. 2016) but our larger sample of planets with high-precision host star properties sharpens the boundary.”
• The GAPS Programme with HARPS-N at TNG - XIV. Investigating giant planet migration history via improved eccentricity and mass determination for 231 transiting planets (2017, unknown): “It has recently been argued that this condition might also explain the sub-Jovian desert, the dearth of sub-Jupiter-mass planets on short-period orbits (Matsakos & Königl 2016; however, see also Mazeh et al. 2016).”
• Photoevaporation and high-eccentricity migration created the sub-Jovian desert (2018, background): “Furthermore, Mazeh et al. (2016) ?”