English

A transiting multi-planet system in the 61 million year old association Theia 116

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2025-06-19 v2

Abstract

Observing and characterizing young planetary systems can aid in unveiling the evolutionary mechanisms that sculpt the mature exoplanet population. As an all-sky survey, NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has expanded the known young planet population as it has observed young comoving stellar populations. This work presents the discovery of a multiplanet system orbiting the 61 Myr old G4V star TIC 434398831 (M = 0.99 Msun, R = 0.91 Rsun, Teff = 5638 K, Tmag = 11.31) located in the Theia 116 comoving population. We estimate the population's age based on rotation periods measured from the TESS light curves, isochrone fitting, and measurements of lithium equivalent widths in the spectra of Theia 116 members. The TESS FFI light curves reveal a mini-Neptune (Rb = 3.51 Rearth, Pb = 3.69 days) and super-Neptune (Rc = 5.63 Rearth, Pc = 6.21 days) with an orbital period ratio slightly larger than 5:3. Follow-up observations from CHEOPS and ground-based telescopes confirm the transits of TIC 434398831 b and c, and constrain their transit times. We explore the potential mass-loss histories of the two planets in order to probe possible initial conditions of the planets immediately after formation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2407.19680,
  title  = {A transiting multi-planet system in the 61 million year old association Theia 116},
  author = {Sydney Vach and George Zhou and Chelsea X. Huang and Andrew W. Mann and Madyson G. Barber and Allyson Bieryla and David W. Latham and Karen A. Collins and James G. Rogers and Luke G. Bouma and Stephanie T. Douglas and Samuel N. Quinn and Tyler R. Fairnington and Joachim Krüger and Avi Shporer and Kevin I. Collins and Gregor Srdoc and Richard P. Schwarz and Howard M. Relles and Khalid Barkaoui and Kim K. McLeod and Alayna Schneider and Norio Narita and Akihiko Fukui and Ramotholo Sefako and William Fong and Ismael Mireles and Guillermo Torres and George R. Ricker and Sara Seager and Joshua N. Winn},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.19680},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

14 pages, 13 figures, 5 tables. Published in MNRAS