TY - JOUR
T1 - An Integrative Analysis of the Rich Planetary System of the Nearby Star e Eridani
T2 - Ideal Targets for Exoplanet Imaging and Biosignature Searches
AU - Basant, Ritvik
AU - Dietrich, Jeremy
AU - Apai, Dániel
N1 - Funding Information: The results reported herein benefited from collaborations and/or information exchange within the program “Alien Earths” (supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under Agreement No. 80NSSC21K0593) for NASA’s Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS) research coordination network sponsored by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. We acknowledge use of the software packages NumPy (Harris et al. ), SciPy (Virtanen et al. ), and Matplotlib (Hunter ). This paper includes data collected by the Kepler mission. Funding for the Kepler mission is provided by the NASA Science Mission Directorate. We obtain the data set from the NASA Exoplanet Archive (NASA Exoplanet Archive ). 5 Funding Information: Our assessment of the e Eridani system provides support for a seven-planet architecture with one planet candidate in the habitable zone of the system. Given its proximity and—in projection—large habitable zone as well as its rich inner planetary system, the nearby e Eridani is likely to further ascend on the lists of planetary systems that are the most promising for exploration via direct imaging and for the search for life. This data set or service is made available by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at IPAC, which is operated by the California Institute of Technology under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The citations in this paper have made use of NASA’s Astrophysics Data System Bibliographic Services. This research uses data from the solar system Dynamics Small-Body Database, which is hosted by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and sponsored by NASA under Contract NAS7-030010. 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. Publisher Copyright: © 2022. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.
PY - 2022/7/1
Y1 - 2022/7/1
N2 - e Eridani, the fifth-closest Sun-like star, hosts at least three planets and could possibly harbor more. However, the veracity of the planet candidates in the system and its full planetary architecture remain unknown. Here we analyze the planetary architecture of e Eridani via DYNAMITE, a method providing an integrative assessment of the system architecture (and possibly yet-undetected planets) by combining statistical, exoplanet-population-level knowledge with incomplete but specific information available on the system. DYNAMITE predicts the most likely location of an additional planet in the system based on the Kepler population demographic information from more than 2000 planets. Additionally, we analyze the dynamical stability of e Eridani system via N-body simulations. Our DYNAMITE and dynamical stability analyses provide support for planet candidates g, c, and f, and also predict one additional planet candidate with an orbital period between 549-733 days, in the habitable zone of the system. We find that planet candidate f, if it exists, would also lie in the habitable zone. Our dynamical stability analysis also shows that the e Eridani planetary eccentricities, as reported, do not allow for a stable system, suggesting that they are lower. We introduce a new statistical approach for estimating the equilibrium and surface temperatures of exoplanets, based on a prior from the planetary albedo distribution. e Eridani is a rich planetary system with a possibility of containing two potentially habitable planets, and its vicinity to our solar system makes it an important target for future imaging studies and biosignature searches.
AB - e Eridani, the fifth-closest Sun-like star, hosts at least three planets and could possibly harbor more. However, the veracity of the planet candidates in the system and its full planetary architecture remain unknown. Here we analyze the planetary architecture of e Eridani via DYNAMITE, a method providing an integrative assessment of the system architecture (and possibly yet-undetected planets) by combining statistical, exoplanet-population-level knowledge with incomplete but specific information available on the system. DYNAMITE predicts the most likely location of an additional planet in the system based on the Kepler population demographic information from more than 2000 planets. Additionally, we analyze the dynamical stability of e Eridani system via N-body simulations. Our DYNAMITE and dynamical stability analyses provide support for planet candidates g, c, and f, and also predict one additional planet candidate with an orbital period between 549-733 days, in the habitable zone of the system. We find that planet candidate f, if it exists, would also lie in the habitable zone. Our dynamical stability analysis also shows that the e Eridani planetary eccentricities, as reported, do not allow for a stable system, suggesting that they are lower. We introduce a new statistical approach for estimating the equilibrium and surface temperatures of exoplanets, based on a prior from the planetary albedo distribution. e Eridani is a rich planetary system with a possibility of containing two potentially habitable planets, and its vicinity to our solar system makes it an important target for future imaging studies and biosignature searches.
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U2 - 10.3847/1538-3881/ac6f58
DO - 10.3847/1538-3881/ac6f58
M3 - Article
SN - 0004-6256
VL - 164
JO - Astronomical Journal
JF - Astronomical Journal
IS - 1
M1 - 12
ER -