A giant planet transiting a 3-Myr protostar with a misaligned disk
Abstract
Astronomers have found more than a dozen planets transiting 10-40 million year old stars, but even younger transiting planets have remained elusive. A possible reason for the lack of such discoveries is that newly formed planets are not yet in a configuration that would be recognized as a transiting planet or cannot exhibit transits because our view is blocked by a protoplanetary disk. However, we now know that many outer disks are warped; provided the inner disk is depleted, transiting planets may thus be visible. Here we report the observations of the transiting planet IRAS 04125+2902 b orbiting a 3 Myr, 0.7 M, pre-main sequence star in the Taurus Molecular Cloud. IRAS 04125+2902 hosts a nearly face-on (i 30) transitional disk and a wide binary companion. The planet has a period of 8.83 days, a radius of 10.9 R (0.97R), and a 95%-confidence upper limit on its mass of 90M (0.3M) from radial velocity measurements, making it a possible precursor of the super-Earths and sub-Neptunes that are commonly found around main-sequence stars. The rotational broadening of the star and the orbit of the wide (4", 635 AU) companion are both consistent with edge-on orientations. Thus, all components of the system appear to be aligned except the outer disk; the origin of this misalignment is unclear. Given the rare set of circumstances required to detect a transiting planet at ages when the disk is still present, IRAS 04125+2902 b likely provides a unique window into sub-Neptunes immediately following formation.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2411.18683,
title = {A giant planet transiting a 3-Myr protostar with a misaligned disk},
author = {Madyson G. Barber and Andrew W. Mann and Andrew Vanderburg and Daniel Krolikowski and Adam Kraus and Megan Ansdell and Logan Pearce and Gregory N. Mace and Sean M. Andrews and Andrew W. Boyle and Karen A. Collins and Matthew De Furio and Diana Dragomir and Catherine Espaillat and Adina D. Feinstein and Matthew Fields and Daniel Jaffe and Ana Isabel Lopez Murillo and Felipe Murgas and Elisabeth R. Newton and Enric Palle and Erica Sawczynec and Richard P. Schwarz and Pa Chia Thao and Benjamin M. Tofflemire and Cristilyn N. Watkins and Jon M. Jenkins and David W. Latham and George Ricker and Sara Seager and Roland Vanderspek and Joshua N. Winn and David Charbonneau and Zahra Essack and David R. Rodriguez and Avi Shporer and Joseph D. Twicken and Jesus Noel Villaseñor},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.18683},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
Initial version submitted to Nature. Stellar, and hence planetary, parameters slightly differ from final version. Published version available at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08123-3