English

The First Dynamical Mass Measurement in the HR 8799 System

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2021-07-07 v1

Abstract

HR 8799 hosts four directly imaged giant planets, but none has a mass measured from first principles. We present the first dynamical mass measurement in this planetary system, finding that the innermost planet HR~8799~e has a mass of 9.61.8+1.9MJup9.6^{+1.9}_{-1.8} \, M_{\rm Jup}. This mass results from combining the well-characterized orbits of all four planets with a new astrometric acceleration detection (5σ\sigma) from the Gaia EDR3 version of the Hipparcos-Gaia Catalog of Accelerations. We find with 95\% confidence that HR~8799~e is below 13MJup13\, M_{\rm Jup}, the deuterium-fusing mass limit. We derive a hot-start cooling age of 4216+2442^{+24}_{-16}\,Myr for HR~8799~e that agrees well with its hypothesized membership in the Columba association but is also consistent with an alternative suggested membership in the β\beta~Pictoris moving group. We exclude the presence of any additional \gtrsim5-MJupM_{\rm Jup} planets interior to HR~8799~e with semi-major axes between \approx3-16\,au. We provide proper motion anomalies and a matrix equation to solve for the mass of any of the planets of HR~8799 using only mass ratios between the planets.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2105.12820,
  title  = {The First Dynamical Mass Measurement in the HR 8799 System},
  author = {G. Mirek Brandt and Timothy D. Brandt and Trent J. Dupuy and Daniel Michalik and Gabriel-Dominique Marleau},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.12820},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Accepted to ApJ Letters