English

Revised Masses for Low Density Planets Orbiting the Disordered M-dwarf System TOI-1266

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2024-10-29 v1

Abstract

We present an analysis of 126 new radial velocity measurements from the MAROON-X spectrograph to investigate the TOI-1266 system, which hosts two transiting sub-Neptunes at 10.8 and 18.8 days. We measure masses of Mb=4.01 ± 0.55 MM_{b}=4.01~\pm~0.55~M_{\oplus} for TOI-1266 b and Mc=2.00 ± 0.72 MM_{c}=2.00~\pm~0.72~M_{\oplus} for TOI-1266 c. Our mass measurements agree with existing HARPS-N observations which we combined using a weighted average yielding masses for TOI-1266 b, and c of Mb=4.10 ± 0.43 MM_{b}=4.10~\pm~0.43~M_{\oplus}, Mc=2.4 ± 0.54 MM_{c}=2.4~\pm~0.54~M_{\oplus} respectively. The combined dataset enabled a 30%\approx30\% improvement in mass precision. With bulk densities of ρb\rho_{b} = 1.25 ±\pm 0.36 g cm3^{-3} and ρc\rho_{c} = 1.36 ±\pm 0.31 g cm3^{-3}, the planets are among the lowest density sub-Neptunes orbiting an M dwarf. They are both consistent with rocky cores surrounded by hydrogen helium envelopes. TOI-1266 c may also be consistent with a water-rich composition, but we disfavor that interpretation from an Occam's razor perspective.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2410.20282,
  title  = {Revised Masses for Low Density Planets Orbiting the Disordered M-dwarf System TOI-1266},
  author = {Dakotah Tyler and Erik A. Petigura and James Rogers and Jack Lubin and Andreas Seifhart and Jacob L. Bean and Madison Brady and Rafael Luque},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.20282},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

8 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T19:36:50.076Z