2018-11-05

Finding planets near resonances

At breakfast, I had a long discussion with Megan Bedell (Flatiron) about what things should go into the discussion part of our wobble paper, in terms of the limitations and extensions of the model. We came up with quite a list! But I love any project that opens new paths.

I also had a long discussion with Rodrigo Luger (Flatiron) about searching for planets in Kepler data that are in 1:1 resonances. He is focused on the point that they will (in general) have large transit-timing variations. I would call these librations around their exact resonances. If we model these librations as approximately sinusoidal, the search space is tractable: A fixed period plus a TTV with some amplitude and period. That's a good idea! And Luger points out that there are strong priors on the amplitudes and periods of the librations. Of course there will be systems that even this setup will miss; there was a dispute between us and Foreman-Mackey (Flatiron) about what fraction. He argued for using a completely stochastic model for the librations. He might be right; but baby steps!

All this motivated by the possible discovery of a 1:1 by Mitchell Karmen (NYU). Of course the actual system he found almost certainly isn't a 1:1, we now think: It has many signs of “just” being an incredibly eccentric eclipsing binary with dilution from a third star.

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