ABSTRACT We present EPIC Variability Extraction and Removal for Exoplanet Science Targets (EVEREST), an open-source pipeline for removing instrumental noise from K2 light curves. EVEREST employs a ...variant of pixel level decorrelation to remove systematics introduced by the spacecraft's pointing error and a Gaussian process to capture astrophysical variability. We apply EVEREST to all K2 targets in campaigns 0-7, yielding light curves with precision comparable to that of the original Kepler mission for stars brighter than , and within a factor of two of the Kepler precision for fainter targets. We perform cross-validation and transit injection and recovery tests to validate the pipeline, and compare our light curves to the other de-trended light curves available for download at the MAST High Level Science Products archive. We find that EVEREST achieves the highest average precision of any of these pipelines for unsaturated K2 stars. The improved precision of these light curves will aid in exoplanet detection and characterization, investigations of stellar variability, asteroseismology, and other photometric studies. The EVEREST pipeline can also easily be applied to future surveys, such as the TESS mission, to correct for instrumental systematics and enable the detection of low signal-to-noise transiting exoplanets. The EVEREST light curves and the source code used to generate them are freely available online.
The distribution of eccentricities e of extrasolar planets with semimajor axes image AU is very uniform, and values for e are relatively large, averaging 0.3 and broadly distributed up to near 1. For ...image AU, eccentricities are much smaller (most image), a characteristic widely attributed to damping by tides after the planets formed and the protoplanetary gas disk dissipated. Most previous estimates of the tidal damping considered the tides raised on the planets, but ignored the tides raised on the stars. Most also assumed specific values for the planets' poorly constrained tidal dissipation parameter image. Perhaps most important, in many studies the strongly coupled evolution between e and a was ignored. We have now integrated the coupled tidal evolution equations for e and a over the estimated age of each planet, and confirmed that the distribution of initial e values of close-in planets matches that of the general population for reasonable Q values, with the best fits for stellar and planetary Q being image10 super(5.5) and image10 super(6.5), respectively. The accompanying evolution of a values shows most close-in planets had significantly larger a at the start of tidal migration. The earlier gas disk migration did not bring all planets to their current orbits. The current small values of a were only reached gradually due to tides over the lifetimes of the planets. These results may have important implications for planet formation models, atmospheric models of 'hot Jupiters,' and the success of transit surveys.
Potentially habitable planets can orbit close enough to their host star that the differential gravity across their diameters can produce an elongated shape. Frictional forces inside the planet ...prevent the bulges from aligning perfectly with the host star and result in torques that alter the planet’s rotational angular momentum. Eventually the tidal torques fix the rotation rate at a specific frequency, a process called tidal locking. Tidally locked planets on circular orbits will rotate synchronously, but those on eccentric orbits will either librate or rotate super-synchronously. Although these features of tidal theory are well known, a systematic survey of the rotational evolution of potentially habitable exoplanets using classic equilibrium tide theories has not been undertaken. I calculate how habitable planets evolve under two commonly used models and find, for example, that one model predicts that the Earth’s rotation rate would have synchronized after 4.5 Gyr if its initial rotation period was 3 days, it had no satellites, and it always maintained the modern Earth’s tidal properties. Lower mass stellar hosts will induce stronger tidal effects on potentially habitable planets, and tidal locking is possible for most planets in the habitable zones of GKM dwarf stars. For fast-rotating planets, both models predict eccentricity growth and that circularization can only occur once the rotational frequency is similar to the orbital frequency. The orbits of potentially habitable planets of very late M dwarfs (
) are very likely to be circularized within 1 Gyr, and hence, those planets will be synchronous rotators. Proxima b is almost assuredly tidally locked, but its orbit may not have circularized yet, so the planet could be rotating super-synchronously today. The evolution of the isolated and potentially habitable
Kepler
planet candidates is computed and about half could be tidally locked. Finally, projected
TESS
planets are simulated over a wide range of assumptions, and the vast majority of potentially habitable cases are found to tidally lock within 1 Gyr. These results suggest that the process of tidal locking is a major factor in the evolution of most of the potentially habitable exoplanets to be discovered in the near future.
Abstract The two innermost planets of the Proxima Centauri system are separated by just 0.02 au, inducing strong gravitational interactions between them. We assess this interaction by leveraging fast ...orbital stability indicators and find that orbital stability is very likely if the initial eccentricities of planets b and d are less than ∼0.2, but cannot confirm stability at larger values. We find that stability is not strongly affected by the true masses of the planets or by the distant planet c. However, mutual inclinations between 95° and 142° often result in unstable motion. We further explore the long-term evolution of the orbits in these stable regions of parameter space and find that circularization can take over 5 Gyr. This tidal evolution could support surface energy fluxes in excess of 1 W m −2 for over 1 Gyr, possibly affecting planet b’s habitability.
We model the long-term X-ray and ultraviolet (XUV) luminosity of TRAPPIST-1 to constrain the evolving high-energy radiation environment experienced by its planetary system. Using a Markov Chain Monte ...Carlo (MCMC) method, we derive probabilistic constraints for TRAPPIST-1's stellar and XUV evolution that account for observational uncertainties, degeneracies between model parameters, and empirical data of low-mass stars. We constrain TRAPPIST-1's mass to m = 0.089 0.001 M and find that its early XUV luminosity likely saturated at . From the posterior distribution, we infer that there is a ∼40% chance that TRAPPIST-1 is still in the saturated phase today, suggesting that TRAPPIST-1 has maintained high activity and LXUV/Lbol 10−3 for several gigayears. TRAPPIST-1's planetary system therefore likely experienced a persistent and extreme XUV flux environment, potentially driving significant atmospheric erosion and volatile loss. The inner planets likely received XUV fluxes ∼103-104 times that of the modern Earth during TRAPPIST-1's ∼1 Gyr long pre-main-sequence phase. Deriving these constraints via MCMC is computationally nontrivial, so scaling our methods to constrain the XUV evolution of a larger number of M dwarfs that harbor terrestrial exoplanets would incur significant computational expenses. We demonstrate that approxposterior, an open source Python machine learning package for approximate Bayesian inference using Gaussian processes, accurately and efficiently replicates our analysis using 980 times less computational time and 1330 times fewer simulations than MCMC sampling using emcee. We find that approxposterior derives constraints with mean errors on the best-fit values and 1 uncertainties of 0.61% and 5.5%, respectively, relative to emcee.
Exomoons in the Habitable Zones of M Dwarfs Martínez-Rodríguez, Héctor; Caballero, José Antonio; Cifuentes, Carlos ...
The Astrophysical journal,
12/2019, Letnik:
887, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
M dwarfs host most of the exoplanets in the local Milky Way. Some of these planets, ranging from sub-Earths to super-Jupiters, orbit in their stars' habitable zones (HZs), although many likely ...possess surface environments that preclude habitability. Moreover, exomoons around these planets could harbor life for long timescales and thus may also be targets for biosignature surveys. Here we investigate the potential habitability, stability, and detectability of exomoons around exoplanets orbiting M dwarfs. We first compile an updated list of known M-dwarf exoplanet hosts, comprising 109 stars and 205 planets. For each M dwarf, we compute and update precise luminosities with the Virtual Observatory spectral energy distribution Analyzer and Gaia DR2 parallaxes to determine inner and outer boundaries of their HZs. For each planet, we retrieve (or, when necessary, homogeneously estimate) their masses and radii, calculate the long-term dynamical stability of hypothetical moons, and identify those planets that can support habitable moons. We find that 33 exoplanet candidates are located in the HZs of their host stars and that four of them could host Moon- to Titan-mass exomoons for timescales longer than the Hubble time.
Exoplanets residing close to their stars can experience evolution of both their physical structures and their orbits due to the influence of their host stars. In this work, we present a coupled ...analysis of dynamical tidal dissipation and atmospheric mass loss for exoplanets in X-ray and ultraviolet (XUV) irradiated environments. As our primary application, we use this model to study the TRAPPIST-1 system and place constraints on the interior structure and orbital evolution of the planets. We start by reporting on an ultraviolet continuum flux measurement (centered around ∼1900 Å) for the star TRAPPIST-1, based on 300 ks of Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory data, and which enables an estimate of the XUV-driven thermal escape arising from XUV photodissociation for each planet. We find that the X-ray flaring luminosity, measured from our X-ray detections, of TRAPPIST-1 is 5.6 × 10−4 L*, while the full flux including non-flaring periods is 6.1 × 10−5 L*, when L* is TRAPPIST-1's bolometric luminosity. We then construct a model that includes both atmospheric mass loss and tidal evolution and requires the planets to attain their present-day orbital elements during this coupled evolution. We use this model to constrain the ratio for each planet. Finally, we use additional numerical models implemented with the Virtual Planet Simulator VPLanet to study ocean retention for these planets using our derived system parameters.
ABSTRACT We constrain the true spin-orbit alignment of the KOI-89 system by numerically fitting the two Kepler photometric light curves produced by the transiting planets KOI-89.01 and KOI-89.02. The ...two planets have periods of 84.69 and 207.58 days, respectively. We find that the two bodies are low-density giant planets with radii of 0.45 0.03 Rjup and 0.43 0.05 Rjup and spin-orbit misalignments of 72° 3° and , respectively. Through dynamic stability tests, we demonstrate the general trend of higher system stability with the two planets close to mutual alignment and estimate their coalignment angle to 20° 20°-i.e., the planets are misaligned with the star but may be aligned with each other. From these results, we limit KOI-89's misalignment mechanisms to star-disk-binary interactions, disk warping via planet-disk interactions, planet-planet scattering, Kozai resonance, or internal gravity waves.
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