English

Orbital Stability of Circumstellar Planets in Binary Systems

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2020-02-11 v1 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

Planets that orbit only one of the stars in stellar binary systems (i.e., circumstellar) are dynamically constrained to a limited range of orbital parameters and thus understanding conditions on their stability is of great importance in exoplanet searches. We perform \sim700 million N-body simulations to identify how stability regions depend on properties of the binary, as well as, the starting planetary inclination and mean longitude relative to the binary orbit. Moreover, we provide grid interpolation maps and lookup tables for the community to use our results. Through Monte-Carlo methods we determine that planets with a semimajor axis apa_p \lesssim8\% of the binary semimajor axis abina_{bin} will likely be stable given the known distribution of binary star parameters. This estimate varies in the Lidov-Kozai regime or for retrograde orbits to 4\% or 10\% of abina_{bin}, respectively. Our method to quickly determine the circumstellar stability limit is important for interpreting observations of binaries using direct imaging with JWST, photometry with TESS, or even astrometry with Gaia.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1912.11019,
  title  = {Orbital Stability of Circumstellar Planets in Binary Systems},
  author = {Billy Quarles and Gongjie Li and Veselin Kostov and Nader Haghighipour},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.11019},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

28 pages, 10 figures, 6 tables; accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal. Numerical tools and data are available in a Github (see https://github.com/saturnaxis/ThreeBody_Stability) and Zenodo (see http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3579202) repository, respectively

R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:54:59.501Z