ARCHITECTURE OF KEPLER'S MULTI-TRANSITING SYSTEMS. II. NEW INVESTIGATIONS WITH TWICE AS MANY CANDIDATES

By D. Fabrycky, Jack J. Lissauer, D. Ragozzine, J. Rowe, J. Steffen, E. Agol, T. Barclay, N. Batalha, William J. Borucki, D. Ciardi and 9 more. 2012

448 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report on the orbital architectures of Kepler systems having multiple-planet candidates identified in the analysis of data from the first six quarters of Kepler data and reported by Batalha et al. (2013). These data show 899 transiting planet candidates in 365 multiple-planet systems and provide a powerful means to study the statistical properties of planetary systems. Using a generic mass–radius relationship, we find that only two pairs of planets in these candidate systems (out of 761 pairs total) appear to be on Hill-unstable orbits, indicating ∼96% of the candidate planetary systems are correctly interpreted as true systems. We find that planet pairs show little statistical preference to be near mean-motion resonances. We identify an asymmetry in the distribution of period ratios near first-order resonances (e.g., 2:1, 3:2), with an excess of planet pairs lying wide of resonance and relatively few lying narrow of resonance. Finally, based upon the transit duration ratios of adjacent planets in each system, we find that the interior planet tends to have a smaller transit impact parameter than the exterior planet does. This finding suggests that the mode of the mutual inclinations of planetary orbital planes is in the range 1.°0–2.°2, for the packed systems of small planets probed by these observations.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Timothy Morton
2. J. Owen
3. Yanqin Wu
4. J. Winn
5. Y. Lithwick
6. E. Petigura
7. Andrew W. Howard
8. B. Fulton

In Instrumentation

1. Timothy Morton
2. J. Owen
3. Andrew W. Howard
4. G. Marcy
5. E. Petigura
6. B. Fulton
7. J. Johnson
8. J. Winn

Citations in the corpus

• TRANSIT TIMING OBSERVATIONS FROM KEPLER. IX. CATALOG OF THE FULL LONG-CADENCE DATA SET (2016, background): “…TTVs, for the single KOIs in particular, could help in constructing a statistical picture of the frequency and architecture of the population of the planetary multiple systems of the Kepler KOIs (e.g., Steffen et al. 2010; Ford et al. 2011, 2012b; Lissauer et al. 2011b; Fabrycky et al. 2014).”
• Breaking the chains: hot super-Earth systems from migration and disruption of compact resonant chains (2017, methodology): “First, a fraction of planet pairs are indeed in first-order mean-motion resonance (Lissauer et al. 2011b; Fabrycky et al. 2014).”
• Spacing of Kepler Planets: Sculpting by Dynamical Instability (2015, background): “Planets detected in these systems likely possess low mutual inclinations (e.g. Lissauer et al. 2011b; Tremaine & Dong 2012; Fang & Margot 2012; Fabrycky et al. 2014), and are spaced closely.”