A possible alignment between the orbits of planetary systems and their visual binary companions

Sam Christian, Andrew Vanderburg, Juliette Becker, Daniel A. Yahalomi, Logan Pearce, George Zhou, Karen A. Collins, Adam L. Kraus, Keivan G. Stassun, Zoe de Beurs, George R. Ricker, Roland K. Vanderspek, David W. Latham, Joshua N. Winn, S. Seager, Jon M. Jenkins, Lyu Abe, Karim Agabi, Pedro J. Amado, David BakerKhalid Barkaoui, Zouhair Benkhaldoun, Paul Benni, John Berberian, Perry Berlind, Allyson Bieryla, Emma Esparza-Borges, Michael Bowen, Peyton Brown, Lars A. Buchhave, Christopher J. Burke, Marco Buttu, Charles Cadieux, Douglas A. Caldwell, David Charbonneau, Nikita Chazov, Sudhish Chimaladinne, Kevin I. Collins, Deven Combs, Dennis M. Conti, Nicolas Crouzet, Jerome P. de Leon, Shila Deljookorani, Brendan Diamond, René Doyon, Diana Dragomir, Georgina Dransfield, Zahra Essack, Phil Evans, Akihiko Fukui, Tianjun Gan, Gilbert A. Esquerdo, Michaël Gillon, Eric Girardin, Pere Guerra, Tristan Guillot, Eleanor Kate K. Habich, Andreea Henriksen, Nora Hoch, Keisuke I Isogai, Emmanuël Jehin, Eric L. N. Jensen, Marshall C. Johnson, John H. Livingston, John F. Kielkopf, Kingsley Kim, Kiyoe Kawauchi, Vadim Krushinsky, Veronica Kunzle, Didier Laloum, Dominic Leger, Pablo Lewin, Franco Mallia, Bob Massey, Mayuko Mori, Kim K. McLeod, Djamel Mékarnia, Ismael Mireles, Nikolay Mishevskiy, Motohide Tamura, Felipe Murgas, Norio Narita, Ramon Naves, Peter Nelson, Hugh P. Osborn, Enric Palle, Hannu Parviainen, Peter Plavchan, Francisco J. Pozuelos, Markus Rabus, Howard M. Relles, Cristina Rodríguez López, Samuel N. Quinn, Francois-Xavier Schmider, Joshua E. Schlieder, Richard P. Schwarz, Avi Shporer, Laurie Sibbald, Gregor Srdoc, Caitlin Stibbards, Hannah Stickler, Olga Suarez, Chris Stockdale, Thiam-Guan Tan, Yuka Terada, Amaury Triaud, Rene Tronsgaard, William C. Waalkes, Gavin Wang, Noriharu Watanabe, Marie-Sainte Wenceslas, Geof Wingham, Justin Wittrock, Carl Ziegler

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Abstract

Astronomers do not have a complete picture of the effects of wide-binary companions (semimajor axes greater than 100 au) on the formation and evolution of exoplanets. We investigate these effects using new data from Gaia Early Data Release 3 and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission to characterize wide-binary systems with transiting exoplanets. We identify a sample of 67 systems of transiting exoplanet candidates (with well-determined, edge-on orbital inclinations) that reside in wide visual binary systems. We derive limits on orbital parameters for the wide-binary systems and measure the minimum difference in orbital inclination between the binary and planet orbits. We determine that there is statistically significant difference in the inclination distribution of wide-binary systems with transiting planets compared to a control sample, with the probability that the two distributions are the same being 0.0037. This implies that there is an overabundance of planets in binary systems whose orbits are aligned with those of the binary. The overabundance of aligned systems appears to primarily have semimajor axes less than 700 au. We investigate some effects that could cause the alignment and conclude that a torque caused by a misaligned binary companion on the protoplanetary disk is the most promising explanation.

Original languageEnglish
Article number207
Number of pages26
JournalThe Astronomical Journal
Volume163
Issue number5
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 11 Apr 2022

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This paper includes data collected by the TESS mission, which are publicly available from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). Funding for the TESS mission is provided by NASA’s Science Mission directorate.

Funding Information:
K.K.M. acknowledges support from the New York Community Trust's Fund for Astrophysical Research.

Funding Information:
The research leading to these results has received funding from the ARC grant for Concerted Research Actions, financed by the Wallonia-Brussels Federation. TRAPPIST is funded by the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (Fond National de la Recherche Scientifique, FNRS) under the grant FRFC 2.5.594.09.F. TRAPPIST-North is a project funded by the University of Liège (Belgium), in collaboration with Cadi Ayyad University of Marrakech (Morocco).

Funding Information:
This work is partly supported by JSPS KAKENHI grant No. JP20K14518, and by Astrobiology Center SATELLITE Research project AB022006.

Funding Information:
This work is partly supported by JSPS KAKENHI grant No. JP21K13955.

Funding Information:
This work is partly supported by JSPS KAKENHI grant No. 20K14521.

Funding Information:
This paper is based on observations made with the MuSCAT3 instrument, developed by the Astrobiology Center and under financial supports by JSPS KAKENHI (JP18H05439) and JST PRESTO (JPMJPR1775), at Faulkes Telescope North on Maui, HI, operated by the Las Cumbres Observatory.

Funding Information:
The IRSF project is a collaboration between Nagoya University and the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) supported by the Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Priority Areas (A) (grant Nos. 10147207 and 10147214) and Optical & Near-Infrared Astronomy Inter-University Cooperation Program, from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) of Japan and the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa.

Funding Information:
C.R.-L. acknowledges financial support from the State Agency for Research of the Spanish MCIU through the Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa award for the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (SEV-2017-0709).

Funding Information:
M.T. is supported by MEXT/JSPS KAKENHI grant Nos. 18H05442, 15H02063, and 22000005.

Funding Information:
This work is partly supported by JSPS KAKENHI grant No. JP18H05439, and JST PRESTO grant No. JPMJPR1775, and a University Research Support Grant from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ).

Funding Information:
P.J.A. acknowledges support from grant AYA2016-79425-C3-3-P of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) and the Centre of Excellence “Severo Ochoa” award to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (SEV-2017-0709).

Funding Information:
This work has been carried out within the framework of the NCCR PlanetS supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Funding Information:
D.D. acknowledges support from the TESS Guest Investigator Program grant No. 80NSSC19K1727 and NASA Exoplanet Research Program grant No. 18-2XRP18_2-0136.

Funding Information:
This work has made use of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia ( https://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia ), processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC; https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dpac/consortium ). Funding for the DPAC has been provided by national institutions, in particular the institutions participating in the Gaia Multilateral Agreement.

Funding Information:
This work is partly supported by JSPS KAKENHI grant No. JP17H04574.

Funding Information:
This work is partly supported by Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Fellows, grant No. JP20J21872.

Funding Information:
This work makes use of observations from the LCOGT network. Part of the LCOGT telescope time was granted by NOIRLab through the Mid-Scale Innovations Program (MSIP). MSIP is funded by the NSF.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.

Keywords

  • astro-ph.EP
  • astro-ph.SR

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