ARCHITECTURE AND DYNAMICS OF KEPLER'S CANDIDATE MULTIPLE TRANSITING PLANET SYSTEMS

By Jack J. Lissauer, D. Ragozzine, D. Fabrycky, J. Steffen, Eric B. Ford, Jon M. Jenkins, Avi Shporer, M. Holman, J. Rowe, Elisa Quintana and 15 more. 2011

637 citations recorded by the source corpus.

About one-third of the ∼1200 transiting planet candidates detected in the first four months of Kepler data are members of multiple candidate systems. There are 115 target stars with two candidate transiting planets, 45 with three, 8 with four, and 1 each with five and six. We characterize the dynamical properties of these candidate multi-planet systems. The distribution of observed period ratios shows that the vast majority of candidate pairs are neither in nor near low-order mean-motion resonances. Nonetheless, there are small but statistically significant excesses of candidate pairs both in resonance and spaced slightly too far apart to be in resonance, particularly near the 2:1 resonance. We find that virtually all candidate systems are stable, as tested by numerical integrations that assume a nominal mass–radius relationship. Several considerations strongly suggest that the vast majority of these multi-candidate systems are true planetary systems. Using the observed multiplicity frequencies, we find that a single population of planetary systems that matches the higher multiplicities underpredicts the number of singly transiting systems. We provide constraints on the true multiplicity and mutual inclination distribution of the multi-candidate systems, revealing a population of systems with multiple super-Earth-size and Neptune-size planets with low to moderate mutual inclinations.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

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Citations in the corpus

• STELLAR AND PLANETARY PROPERTIES OF K2 CAMPAIGN 1 CANDIDATES AND VALIDATION OF 17 PLANETS, INCLUDING A PLANET RECEIVING EARTH-LIKE INSOLATION (2015, background): “The remaining three are all representative of the multiple-planet systems observed by Kepler (Lissauer et al. 2011; Fabrycky et al. 2014).”
• Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) (2014, background): “NASA’s Kepler mission revolutionized exoplanetary science by revealing that such planets are abundant,(2,3) and seem to have a wide range of compositions(4) and interesting orbital configurations.(5) However, most of the Kepler stars are too faint for detailed follow-up observations.”
• ORBITAL MOTION OF HR 8799 b, c, d USING HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE DATA FROM 1998: CONSTRAINTS ON INCLINATION, ECCENTRICITY, AND STABILITY (2011, background): “These include discoveries using radial velocities (Fischer et al. 2008; Rivera et al. 2010), transits (Holman et al. 2010; Lissauer et al. 2011a,b), microlensing (Gaudi et al. 2008), and pulsar timing (Wolszczan 1994).”
• THE STATISTICS OF MULTI-PLANET SYSTEMS (2011, methodology): “To check this, we have repeated the analysis for the Kepler sample examined by Lissauer et al. (2011b), who imposed a period cut 3 days < P < 125 days, a radius cut 1.5 R⊕ R 6 R⊕, and a signal/noise cut S/N 16, which reduced the number of planets by almost 40%.”
• ARCHITECTURE OF KEPLER'S MULTI-TRANSITING SYSTEMS. II. NEW INVESTIGATIONS WITH TWICE AS MANY CANDIDATES (2012, background): “Contemporary with the previous catalog, Lissauer et al. (2011b) (hereafter Paper I) examined the dynamics and architectures of the candidate multiplanet systems.”
• TESTING IN SITU ASSEMBLY WITH THE KEPLER PLANET CANDIDATE SAMPLE (2013, methodology): “There is also a consistency of the observed ratios despite different sample selections by different authors (Lissauer et al. 2011b; Tremaine & Dong 2012; Fang & Margot 2012), suggesting that the comparison is also robust with respect to the particular observational cuts.”
• One of the closest exoplanet pairs to the 3:2 mean motion resonance: K2-19b and c (2015, background): “High frequencies of systems with ratios of 1.5 and 2.0 (Lissauer et al. 2011) are suggestive that the 3:2 and 2:1 commensurabilities represent a significant tracer of formation, regardless of whether those planetary candidates are actually locked inside of a MMR. Recently, the frequency of systems…”
• The HARPS search for southern extra-solar planets (2018, background): “In particular, Kepler found many systems with period ratios (Pout/Pin) lower than 1.5 (Lissauer et al. 2011; Fabrycky et al. 2014).”
• Transit timing observations from Kepler - III. : Confirmation of four multiple planet systems by a Fourier-domain study of anticorrelated transit timing variations (2012, methodology): “Starting with nominal masses of Mp = R 2.06 p , where Mp is in Earth masses and Rp is in Earth radii (Lissauer et al. 2011b), we scale the masses to large values with a common multiplier (see Fabrycky et al. (2011) for additional details).”
• The California-Kepler Survey. I. High-resolution Spectroscopy of 1305 Stars Hosting Kepler Transiting Planets (2017, background): “These iconic Kepler systems present opportunities to determine planet masses and orbital properties through dynamical effects (Ford et al. 2011; Lissauer et al. 2011b) and have inspired new classes of planet formation models (Hansen & Murray 2012; Chiang & Laughlin 2013).”
• Predictions of the WFIRST Microlensing Survey. I. Bound Planet Detection Rates (2018, methodology): “To estimate the Kepler mass function we applied the simplistic mass-radius Mp/M⊕ = (Rp/R⊕)2.06 relation of Lissauer et al. (2011) to the Kepler candidates with koi score > 0.5.2 The first point to note is the large numbers of planets that WFIRST is expected to detect, using any of the designs and…”
• ALL SIX PLANETS KNOWN TO ORBIT KEPLER-11 HAVE LOW DENSITIES (2013, methodology): “…the reductions in size estimates, all planets are large for their masses in the sense that they lie above both the Mp/M⊕ ≈ (Rp/R⊕)2.06 relationship that is valid for planets in our solar system (Lissauer et al. 2011b) and mass–radius fits to exoplanets (Wu & Lithwick 2012; Weiss et al. 2013).”
• DENSITIES AND ECCENTRICITIES OF 139 KEPLER PLANETS FROM TRANSIT TIME VARIATIONS (2013, methodology): “The inclination dispersion is found to be very small– a few degrees (e.g., Lissauer et al. 2011a; Figueira et al. 2012; Tremaine & Dong 2012; Fang & Margot 2012; Johansen et al. 2012; Weissbein et al. 2012).”
• AN ANCIENT EXTRASOLAR SYSTEM WITH FIVE SUB-EARTH-SIZE PLANETS (2015, methodology): “Other highly-compact multiple-planet systems – characterized by a concentration of dynamically packed planets near 0.1AU – include, e.g., Kepler-11 (Lissauer et al. 2011a), Kepler32 (Swift et al. 2013), Kepler-33 (Lissauer et al. 2012), and Kepler-80 (Rowe et al. 2014), all with at least five…”
• They are small worlds after all: revised properties of Kepler M dwarf stars and their planets (2015, background): “A full description of the occurrence of planets should include a description of their non-Poisson correlated distribution among stars (Swift et al. 2013; Muirhead et al. 2015; Ballard & Johnson 2016) and the coplanarity of their orbits (Lissauer et al. 2011; Fang & Margot 2012).”
• TRANSIT TIMING OBSERVATIONS FROM KEPLER. VIII. CATALOG OF TRANSIT TIMING MEASUREMENTS OF THE FIRST TWELVE QUARTERS (2013, background): “One could expect that the derived 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 KOIs (e.g., F11; Ford et al. 2012b; Lissauer et al. 2011b; Steffen et al. 2010).”
• A PLATEAU IN THE PLANET POPULATION BELOW TWICE THE SIZE OF EARTH (2013, background): “We find the in situ model plausible because it naturally explains the large number of close, sub-Neptunesize planets, the high rate of planet multiplicity and nearly co-planar and circular orbits (Lissauer et al. 2011; Fang & Margot 2012), and does not require tuning of planet migration models.”
• MIGRATION THEN ASSEMBLY: FORMATION OF NEPTUNE-MASS PLANETS INSIDE 1 AU (2011, background): “In addition to the radial velocity surveys, the Kepler satellite has begun to release the contents of its large-scale transit catalog (Borucki et al. 2011; Lissauer et al. 2011b).”