The Dynamical Architecture and Habitable Zones of the Quintuplet Planetary System 55 Cancri

Abstract

We perform numerical simulations to study the secular orbital evolution and dynamical structure in the quintuplet planetary system 55 Cancri with the self-consistent orbital solutions by Fischer and coworkers (2008). In the simulations, we show that this system can be stable at least for $10^8$ yr. In addition, we extensively investigate the planetary configuration of four outer companions with one terrestrial planet in the wide region of 0.790 AU $\le a\le$ 5.900 AU to examine the existence of potential asteroid structure and Habitable Zones (HZs). We show that there are unstable regions for the orbits about 4:1, 3:1 and 5:2 mean motion resonances (MMRs) with the outermost planet in the system, and several stable orbits can remain at 3:2 and 1:1 MMRs, which is resemblance to the asteroidal belt in solar system. In a dynamical point, the proper candidate HZs for the existence of more potential terrestrial planets reside in the wide area between 1.0 AU and 2.3 AU for relatively low eccentricities.

12 pages, 4 figures, accepted to Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics

References in corpus (5)

• The Dynamical Simulations of the Planets Orbiting GJ 876
• Could the 55 Cancri Planetary System Really Be in the 3:1 Mean Motion Resonance?
• Could the 47 UMa Planetary System be a Second Solar System: predicting the Earth-like planets
• The Secular Evolution and Dynamical Architecture of the Neptunian Triplet Planetary System HD 69830
• Stable chaos in the 55Cnc exoplanetary system?