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A giant planet transiting a 3-Myr protostar with a misaligned disk

Nature volume 635, pages 574–577 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Astronomers have found more than a dozen planets transiting stars that are 10–40 million years old1, but younger transiting planets have remained elusive. The lack of such discoveries may be because planets have not fully formed at this age or because our view is blocked by the protoplanetary disk. However, we now know that many outer disks are warped or broken2; provided the inner disk is depleted, transiting planets may thus be visible. Here we report observations of the transiting planet IRAS 04125+2902 b orbiting a 3-million-year-old, 0.7-solar-mass, pre-main-sequence star in the Taurus Molecular Cloud. The host star harbours a nearly face-on (30 degrees inclination) transitional disk3 and a wide binary companion. The planet has a period of 8.83 days, a radius of 10.7 Earth radii (0.96 Jupiter radii) and a 95%-confidence upper limit on its mass of 90 Earth masses (0.3 Jupiter masses) from radial-velocity measurements, making it a possible precursor of the super-Earths and sub-Neptunes frequently found around main-sequence stars. The rotational broadening of the star and the orbit of the wide (4 arcseconds, 635 astronomical units) companion are both consistent with edge-on orientations. Thus, all components of the system are consistent with alignment except the outer disk; the origin of this misalignment is unclear.

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Fig. 1: TESS light curve of IRAS 04125+2902.
Fig. 2: Ground-based transit observations of IRAS 04125+2902.
Fig. 3: Submillimeter Array observations of the protoplanetary disk.
Fig. 4: Illustration of the system configuration.

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Data availability

We provide all reduced light curves and spectra in a GitHub repository: https://github.com/madysonb/discovery_resources. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

We provide access to a GitHub repository including all code created for the analysis of this project that is not already publicly available at https://github.com/madysonb/discovery_resources.

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Acknowledgements

We thank G. Herczeg for providing the SNIFS spectrum of the host star; S. Blunt for her comments on the paper; and Halee and Bandit for their support during this project. M.G.B. was supported by NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (DGE-2040435), the NC Space Grant Graduate Research Fellowship, and the TESS Guest Investigator Cycle 5 programme (21-TESS21-0016, principal investigator D.D.). A.W.M. was supported by the NSF CAREER programme (AST-2143763). M.D.F. is supported by an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship (AST-2303911). D.D. acknowledges support from the TESS Guest Investigator Program (80NSSC23K0769). M.F. was supported by NASA’s exoplanet research programme (XRP 80NSSC21K0393). Funding for the TESS mission is provided by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. We acknowledge the use of public TESS data from pipelines at the TESS Science Office and at the TESS Science Processing Operations Center. Resources supporting this work were provided by the NASA High-End Computing (HEC) Program through the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames Research Center for the production of the SPOC data products. TESS data presented in this paper were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) at the Space Telescope Science Institute. This work makes use of observations from the LCOGT network. This paper uses observations from the Habitable-zone Planet Finder on the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory. M.G.B. is an NSF Fellow. A.D.F. is an NHFP Sagan Fellow. B.M.T. is a 51 Pegasi b Fellow.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Madyson G. Barber, Andrew W. Mann, Andrew W. Boyle, Matthew Fields, Ana Isabel Lopez Murillo & Pa Chia Thao

  2. Department of Physics and Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Andrew Vanderburg, George Ricker, Sara Seager, Roland Vanderspek, Avi Shporer & Jesus Noel Villaseñor

  3. Steward Observatory, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Daniel Krolikowski & Logan Pearce

  4. Department of Astronomy, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Adam Kraus, Gregory N. Mace, Matthew De Furio, Daniel Jaffe, Erica Sawczynec & Benjamin M. Tofflemire

  5. NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC, USA

    Megan Ansdell

  6. Center for Astrophysics ∣ Harvard & Smithsonian, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Sean M. Andrews, Karen A. Collins, Richard P. Schwarz, Cristilyn N. Watkins, David W. Latham & David Charbonneau

  7. Department of Physics and Astronomy, The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA

    Diana Dragomir & Zahra Essack

  8. Institute for Astrophysical Research, Department of Astronomy, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

    Catherine Espaillat

  9. Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    Adina D. Feinstein

  10. Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), La Laguna, Spain

    Felipe Murgas & Enric Palle

  11. Departamento de Astrofísica, Universidad de La Laguna (ULL), La Laguna, Spain

    Felipe Murgas & Enric Palle

  12. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

    Elisabeth R. Newton

  13. NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, USA

    Jon M. Jenkins & Joseph D. Twicken

  14. Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Sara Seager

  15. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Sara Seager

  16. Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Joshua N. Winn

  17. Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD, USA

    David R. Rodriguez

  18. SETI Institute, Mountain View, CA, USA

    Joseph D. Twicken

Authors
  1. Madyson G. Barber
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  2. Andrew W. Mann
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  3. Andrew Vanderburg
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  4. Daniel Krolikowski
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  5. Adam Kraus
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  6. Megan Ansdell
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  7. Logan Pearce
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  8. Gregory N. Mace
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  9. Sean M. Andrews
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  10. Andrew W. Boyle
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  11. Karen A. Collins
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  12. Matthew De Furio
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  13. Diana Dragomir
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  14. Catherine Espaillat
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  15. Adina D. Feinstein
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  16. Matthew Fields
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  17. Daniel Jaffe
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  18. Ana Isabel Lopez Murillo
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  19. Felipe Murgas
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  20. Elisabeth R. Newton
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  21. Enric Palle
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  22. Erica Sawczynec
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  23. Richard P. Schwarz
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  24. Pa Chia Thao
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  25. Benjamin M. Tofflemire
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  26. Cristilyn N. Watkins
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  27. Jon M. Jenkins
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  28. David W. Latham
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  29. George Ricker
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  30. Sara Seager
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  31. Roland Vanderspek
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  32. Joshua N. Winn
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  33. David Charbonneau
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  34. Zahra Essack
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  35. David R. Rodriguez
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  36. Avi Shporer
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  37. Joseph D. Twicken
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  38. Jesus Noel Villaseñor
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Contributions

M.G.B. identified the planet candidate, preformed the transit and false-positive analysis, helped organize further analysis and observations, made most figures for the paper, and wrote large portions of the paper. A.W.M. estimated parameters of the host star and companion, organized LCO follow-up, helped with analysis of the ground-based photometry and wrote large portions of the paper. A.V. wrote the light-curve extraction pipeline to help identify the target and consulted on the pipeline’s outputs. D.K. analysed the radial velocity from HPF and wrote the portion of the paper describing the analysis. A.K. helped organize the HPF observations, contributed to the LCO observation time, contributed NIRC2 observation time, analysed the adaptive optics images and contributed to the binary analysis. M.A. analysed the disk and wrote the portion of the paper describing the analysis. L.P. analysed the binary’s orbit and wrote the portion of the paper describing the analysis. G.N.M. fit the IGRINS data and extracted the radial velocities. G.N.M., D.J. and E.S. provided the IGRINS data. S.M.A. and C.E. provided the Submillimeter Array data. A.W.B. calculated the rotation period and wrote the portion of the paper that describes the analysis. K.A.C., R.P.S., F.M., E.P. and C.N.W. contributed LCO observation time and reduced the data. M.D.F. aided in the Keck/NIRC2 observations. D.D. provided funding for the project during the planet discovery and characterization. A.D.F. created the schematic representation of the system. M.F. analysed the Vsin(i★). A.I.L.M. analysed the TTVs. E.R.N. aided in organizing follow-up observations. B.M.T. contributed to the LCO observation time and contributed NIRC2 observation time. P.C.T. contributed code to make the planet demographics plots. J.J. leads the SPOC which provided the calibrated FFI data and PDC and SAP light curves used in the analysis. J.M.J., D.W.L., G.R., S.S., R.V. and J.N.W. are TESS mission architects. D.C., Z.E., D.R.R., A.S., J.D.T. and J.N.V. are TESS mission contributors.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Madyson G. Barber.

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Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Fig. 1 Radial velocities and signal fit models.

Radial velocities of IRAS 04125+2902 phased to the period of the planet. RVs from APOGEE are shown as stars, those from IGRINS are shown as squares, and those from HPF are shown as circles colored by the stellar rotation phase (with an arbitrary zero point). Error bars represent the 1σ uncertainties. We show the expected signals from a 0.5 and 1 MJ companion, as well as the 95% upper-mass limit (0.3 MJ) and 100 random draws from the fit posterior. The long term RVs rule out any companion of stellar mass, and the best-fit of the HPF measurements constrains the planet’s upper mass limit.

Extended Data Fig. 2 SED fit of IRAS 04125+2902.

Example fit to the SED and residuals (in σ), showing a combination of a template and atmospheric model (purple) compared to the observed photometry (green). The vertical errors are the photometric uncertainties (in almost all cases, smaller than the size of the symbol), while the horizontal error bars indicate the width of the filter. The inset shows the template compared to the observed SNIFS spectrum of IRAS 04125+2902.

Source Data

Extended Data Fig. 3 Individual transits of IRAS 04125+2902 b from TESS.

Representative transits from each TESS sector (grey points). SPOC data in sectors 43, 44, 59, 70, and 71 are binned to 30 minute intervals (purple points) for a fair comparison to sector 19 (30-minute FFI only). The combined GP and transit model is shown as the solid red line with a dashed line showing the GP fit without the transit.

Extended Data Fig. 4 IRAS 04125+2902 b in comparison to other transiting systems.

The contour distribution of (primarily older) planets discovered by Kepler and K2113 overlapped with the young (<700 Myr) transiting systems discovered in a cluster or association. The young planets are coloured by their approximate age in log space. IRAS 04125+2902 b is marked with a star and sits high in radius compared to older systems. Planet properties from ref. 114.

Extended Data Fig. 5 Orbital properties of the binary companion.

a, 100 random fits of the orbit of TIC 56658273 coloured by the orbital phase. The orange star represents the location of the host star, IRAS 04125+2902, and the green stars represent the measured relative locations of TIC 56658273. The 1σ uncertainties of the locations of TIC 56658273 are smaller than the data points, and the individual locations are indistinguishable at this scale. b, Corner plot of the parameters of the wide binary companion. The dashed lines represent the 16th and 84th percentile of the distribution. 99% of points are shown for clarity. The inclination of the orbit is highly consistent with edge-on.

Extended Data Fig. 6 Imaging data of IRAS 04125+2902.

a, Contrasts from high-resolution data. We show the deepest data for each band, but additionally separating K-band imaging (green) and K-band NRM (yellow) as they cover different angular separations. A simple break-point linear fit for each band is shown for clarity. b,c, AO images from Keck/NIRC2 of IRAS 04125+2902 across 2 epochs with circles representing the previous/future locations: 2009 (dotted yellow), 2014 (dashed blue), and 2023 (solid pink). Based on the Gaia proper motions, the star has moved ~ 305 mas (6 λ/D) over the 14 year period spanned by the Keck/NIRC2 data, which is greater than the PSF width of the star. We can see there are no stars coming in or out of view that could be causing the observed transit signal.

Extended Data Table 1 Ground-based transit and variability fit parameters
Full size table
Extended Data Table 2 Keck/NIRC2 astrometry
Full size table
Extended Data Table 3 Radial velocity measurements of IRAS 04125+2902
Full size table
Extended Data Table 4 Properties of IRAS 04125+2902 b
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Extended Data Table 5 Parameters of the host star and companion
Full size table

Source data

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Barber, M.G., Mann, A.W., Vanderburg, A. et al. A giant planet transiting a 3-Myr protostar with a misaligned disk. Nature 635, 574–577 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08123-3

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