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Dispersed Matter Planet Project discoveries of ablating planets orbiting nearby bright stars

Nature Astronomy volume 4, pages 408–418 (2020)Cite this article

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Abstract

Some highly irradiated close-in exoplanets orbit stars showing anomalously low stellar chromospheric emission. We attribute this deficit to absorption by circumstellar gas replenished by mass loss from ablating planets. Here we report statistics validating this hypothesis. Among ~3,000 nearby, bright, main-sequence stars, ~40 show depressed chromospheric emission indicative of undiscovered mass-losing planets. The Dispersed Matter Planet Project uses high-precision, high-cadence radial velocity (RV) measurements to detect these planets. We summarize results for two planetary systems (DMPP-1 and DMPP-3) and fully present observations revealing an Mp sin i = 0.469 MJ planet in a 5.207 d orbit around the γ Doradus pulsator HD 11231 (DMPP-2). We have detected short-period planets wherever we have made more than 60 RV measurements, demonstrating that we have originated a very efficient method for detecting nearby compact planetary systems. These shrouded, ablating planetary systems may be a short-lived phase related to the Neptunian desert, that is, the dearth of intermediate-mass planets at short orbital periods. The circumstellar gas facilitates compositional analysis, allowing empirical exogeology in the cases of sublimating rocky planets. Dispersed Matter Planet Project discoveries will be important for establishing the empirical mass–radius–composition relationship(s) for low-mass planets.

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Fig. 1: The sample of 2,716 main-sequence (MS) stars from which our targets were drawn13 and known hot-Jupiter (HJ) hosts14.
Fig. 2: Distance and magnitude distributions of DMPP targets.
Fig. 3: Observations of DMPP-2 with MIKE and HARPS showing derived RVs and corresponding uncertainties (RV error bars are 1σ throughout).
Fig. 4: Window function and log-likelihood periodograms for DMPP-2 RVs.
Fig. 5: Folded RVs for DMPP-2 corresponding to the maximum a posteriori solutions in Table 1.
Fig. 6: MP sin i versus orbital period for the first three DMPP systems.

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Data availability

The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, Carole.Haswell@open.ac.uk, on reasonable request. All HARPS RV data, collected under ESO programmes 081.C-0148(A), 088.C-0662(A), 091.C-0866(C), 095.C-0799(A), 096.C-0876(A), 097.C-0390(B), 098.C-0269(A) 098.C0499(A), 098.C-0269(B), 099.C-0798(A) and 0100.C-0836(A), are publically available from the ESO archive.

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Acknowledgements

This work is based on observations collected at the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere under ESO programmes 081.C-0148(A), 088.C-0662(A), 091.C-0866(C), 095.C-0799(A), 096.C-0876(A), 097.C-0390(B), 098.C-0269(A), 098.C0499(A), 098.C-0269(B), 099.C-0798(A) and 0100.C-0836(A). The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013 and FP7/2013-2016) under grant agreements RG226604 and 312430 (OPTICON). These results were based on observations awarded by ESO, OPTICON and OHP using HARPS, HARPS-N and SOPHIE. This research has made use of the SIMBAD data base, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France. We thank P. Arriagada for providing the archival observations from the MIKE spectrograph at the Las Campanas Observatory. D.S. was supported by an STFC studentship. C.A.H. and J.R.B. were supported by STFC Consolidated Grants ST/L000776/1 and ST/P000584/1; D.S., J.S.J. and J.C. were supported by STFC studentships. G.A.-E. was supported by STFC Consolidated Grant ST/P000592/1; J.S.J. acknowledges support by FONDECYT grant 1161218 and partial support from CONICYT project Basal AFB-170002. We thank several anonymous referees of DMPP papers for their constructive comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Physical Sciences, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

    Carole A. Haswell, Daniel Staab, John R. Barnes, Luca Fossati, Andrew J. Norton, James P. J. Doherty & Joseph Cooper

  2. AVS, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Harwell, UK

    Daniel Staab

  3. School of Physics and Astronomy, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK

    Guillem Anglada-Escudé

  4. Space Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Graz, Austria

    Luca Fossati

  5. Departamento de Astronomía, Universidad de Chile, Las Condes, Santiago, Chile

    James S. Jenkins

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Contributions

C.A.H. plans and leads all aspects of the DMPP collaboration, secured the funding and wrote the proposals and the paper. D.S. performed target selection and initial RV analyses and contributed to proposal writing. J.R.B. performed final RV analyses, contributed to proposal writing and cowrote the paper, with G.A.-E. providing software and expertise. L.F. contributed to the analysis and proposal writing. A.J.N. carried out analysis of the SuperWASP photometry data. J.S.J. provided expertise on stellar activity and the log R′HK metric. C.A.H., D.S., J.R.B., J.S.J., J.P.J.D. and J.C. performed observations with HARPS and SOPHIE. All authors were given the opportunity to review the results and comment on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Carole A. Haswell.

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Haswell, C.A., Staab, D., Barnes, J.R. et al. Dispersed Matter Planet Project discoveries of ablating planets orbiting nearby bright stars. Nat Astron 4, 408–418 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-019-0973-y

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