Constraining the nature of the possible extrasolar PDS110b ring system

Abstract

The young star PDS110 in the Ori OB1a association underwent two similar eclipses in 2008 and 2011, each of which lasted for a period of at least 25 days. One plausible explanation for these events is that the star was eclipsed by an unseen giant planet (named PDS110b) circled by a ring system that fills a large fraction of its Hill sphere. Through thousands of numerical simulations of the three-body problem, we constrain the mass and eccentricity of this planet as well the size and inclination of its ring, parameters that are not well determined by the observational data alone. We carried out a broad range of different configurations for the PDS110b ring system and ruled out all that did not match with the observations. The result shows that the ring system could be prograde or retrograde; the preferred solution is that the ring has an inclination lower than $60^{\circ }$ and a radius between 0.1 and 0.2 au and that the planet is more massive than $35M_{\mathrm{Jup}}$ and has a low eccentricity (<0.05).

References in corpus (5)

• Gaia Data Release 1. Summary of the astrometric, photometric, and survey properties
• Modeling giant extrasolar ring systems in eclipse and the case of J1407b: sculpting by exomoons?
• Periodic Eclipses of the Young Star PDS 110 Discovered with WASP and KELT Photometry
• Constraints on the size and dynamics of the J1407b ring system
• The PDS 110 observing campaign - photometric and spectroscopic observations reveal eclipses are aperiodic