It takes two planets in resonance to tango around K2-146
Abstract
K2-146 is a cool, 0.358 M_sun dwarf that was found to host a mini-Neptune with a 2.67-days period. The planet exhibited strong transit timing variations (TTVs) of greater than 30 minutes, indicative of the presence of a further object in the system. Here we report the discovery of the previously undetected outer planet, K2-146 c, in the system using additional photometric data. K2-146 c was found to have a grazing transit geometry and a 3.97-day period. The outer planet was only significantly detected in the latter K2 campaigns presumably because of precession of its orbital plane. The TTVs of K2-146 b and c were measured using observations spanning a baseline of almost 1200 days. We found strong anti-correlation in the TTVs, suggesting the two planets are gravitationally interacting. Our TTV and transit model analyses revealed that K2-146 b has a radius of 2.25 0.10 \R_earth and a mass of 5.6 0.7 M_earth, whereas K2-146 c has a radius of R_earth and a mass of 7.1 0.9 M_earth. The inner and outer planets likely have moderate eccentricities of and , respectively. Long-term numerical integrations of the two-planet orbital solution show that it can be dynamically stable for at least 2 Myr. The evaluation of the resonance angles of the planet pair indicates that K2-146 b and c are likely trapped in a 3:2 mean motion resonance. The orbital architecture of the system points to a possible convergent migration origin.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1907.11141,
title = {It takes two planets in resonance to tango around K2-146},
author = {Kristine W. F. Lam and Judith Korth and Kento Masuda and Szilárd Csizmadia and Philipp Eigmüller and Guðmundur Kári Stefánsson and Michael Endl and Simon Albrecht and Rafael Luque and John H. Livingston and Teruyuki Hirano and Roi Alonso Sobrino and Oscar Barragán and Juan Cabrera and Ilaria Carleo and Alexander Chaushev and William D. Cochran and Fei Dai and Jerome de Leon and Hans J. Deeg and Anders Erikson and Massimiliano Esposito and Malcolm Fridlund and Akihiko Fukui and Davide Gandolfi and Iskra Georgieva and Lucá Gonzalez Cuesta and Sascha Grziwa and Eike W. Guenther and Artie P. Hatzes and Diego Hidalgo and Maria Hjorth and Petr Kabath and Emil Knudstrup and Mikkel N. Lund and Suvrath Mahadevan and Savita Mathur and Pilar Montañes Rodríguez and Felipe Murgas and Norio Narita and David Nespral and Prajwal Niraula and Enric Palle and Martin Pätzold and Carina M. Persson and Jorge Prieto-Arranz and Heike Rauer and Seth Redfield and Ignasi Ribas and Paul Robertson and Marek Skarka and Alexis M. S. Smith and Jan Subjak and Vincent Van Eylen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.11141},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
19 pages with 13 figures and 4 tables; Submitted