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RADIAL VELOCITY DISCOVERY OF AN ECCENTRIC JOVIAN WORLD ORBITING AT 18 AU
Sarah Blunt
1,2,3
, Michael Endl
4
, Lauren M. Weiss
5,6
, William D. Cochran
4
, Andrew W. Howard
1
, Phillip J.
MacQueen
4
,Benjamin J. Fulton
1, 18
, Gregory W. Henry
17
, Marshall C. Johnson
15,4
Molly R. Kosiarek
3,7
, Kellen
D. Lawson
10
, Bruce Macintosh
11
, Sean M. Mills
1
, Eric L. Nielsen
11
, Erik A. Petigura
1
, Glenn Schneider
9
,
Andrew Vanderburg
19, 20
, John P. Wisniewski
10
, Robert A. Wittenmyer
16,4
, Erik Brugamyer
4
, Caroline
Caldwell
4
, Anita L. Cochran
4
, Artie P. Hatzes
13
, Lea A. Hirsch
11
, Howard Isaacson
8,21
, Paul Robertson
14,4
,
Arpita Roy
1
, Zili Shen
4
1
Department of Astronomy, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA
2
Center for Astrophysics
|
Harvard & Smithsonian, Cambridge, MA, USA
3
NSF Graduate Research Fellow
4
McDonald Observatory and Department of Astronomy, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA
5
Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawai‘i, Honolulu, HI, USA
6
Beatrice Watson Parrent Fellow
7
Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA
8
Astronomy Department, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
9
Steward Observatory, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
10
Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA
11
Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
13
Th ̈uringer Landessternwarte, Tautenburg, Germany, EU
14
University of California, Irvine, CA, USA
15
Department of Astronomy, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
16
Centre for Astrophysics, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, QLD, Australia
17
Center of Excellence in Information Systems, Tennessee State University, Nashville, TN, USA
18
IPAC-NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, Pasadena, CA, USA
19
NASA Sagan Fellow
20
Department of Astronomy, Unversity of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA
21
University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, QLD 4350, Australia
ABSTRACT
Based on two decades of radial velocity (RV) observations using Keck/HIRES and McDonald/Tull,
and more recent observations using the Automated Planet Finder, we found that the nearby star HR
5183 (HD 120066) hosts a 3
M
J
minimum mass planet with an orbital period of 74
+43
22
years. The
orbit is highly eccentric (e
'
0.84), shuttling the planet from within the orbit of Jupiter to beyond
the orbit of Neptune. Our careful survey design enabled high cadence observations before, during,
and after the planet’s periastron passage, yielding precise orbital parameter constraints. We searched
for stellar or planetary companions that could have excited the planet’s eccentricity, but found no
candidates, potentially implying that the perturber was ejected from the system. We did identify a
bound stellar companion more than 15,000 au from the primary, but reasoned that it is currently
too widely separated to have an appreciable effect on HR 5183 b. Because HR 5183 b’s wide orbit
takes it more than 30 au (1”) from its star, we also explored the potential of complimentary studies
with direct imaging or stellar astrometry. We found that a Gaia detection is very likely, and that
imaging at 10
μ
m is a promising avenue. This discovery highlights the value of long-baseline RV
surveys for discovering and characterizing long-period, eccentric Jovian planets. This population may
offer important insights into the dynamical evolution of planetary systems containing multiple massive
planets.
Keywords:
planets and satellites: detection - planets and satellites: fundamental parameters - stars:
individual (HR 5183)
1.
INTRODUCTION
Radial velocity (RV) and transit surveys have char-
acterized very few planets beyond 5 au (Howard et al.
arXiv:1908.09925v1 [astro-ph.EP] 26 Aug 2019
2
Blunt et al.
2010; Mayor et al. 2011; Petigura et al. 2013; Fressin
et al. 2013), leaving the population characteristics of
long-period planets largely unknown. Direct imaging is
sensitive to such planets, but the current generation of
instruments is limited to planets several times the mass
of Jupiter orbiting young, massive stars (Bowler 2016;
Nielsen et al. 2019). Microlensing is also sensitive to
planets at large separations from their stars, and mi-
crolensing results already allow for occurrence calcula-
tions of planet mass as a function of separation (Suzuki
et al. 2016). However, mircolensing results will not en-
able detailed orbital or system architecture characteriza-
tion. On the other hand, RV surveys are limited by their
baselines. Several authors have used RV trends or other
incomplete orbital arcs to constrain the properties of
long-period planets and substellar objects (Wright et al.
2007, 2009; Knutson et al. 2014; Bouchy et al. 2016;
Rickman et al. 2019; Bryan et al. 2016), but it is chal-
lenging to pin down the physical parameters of planets
with orbital periods much longer than the survey base-
line. Some authors assume circular orbits in order to
cut down the wide parameter space of possible orbits
(e.g. Knutson et al. 2014), but even so posteriors over
semimajor axis and minimum mass span wide ranges.
Long-baseline RV surveys dating back to the mid-
1980s (Campbell 1983; Marcy 1983; Mayor & Maurice
1985; Campbell et al. 1988; Marcy & Benitz 1989; Zech-
meister et al. 2013; Fischer et al. 2014; Wittenmyer et al.
2014; Marmier et al. 2013; Moutou et al. 2015; Endl et al.
2016) are beginning to fill this characterization gap as
their time baselines increase. The long-period (
>
1 yr)
planets discovered by these surveys share characteris-
tics with the directly imaged planets and the shorter-
period RV-discovered planets. As these surveys mature,
they will allow us to characterize the transition from
older, less massive, shorter-period RV-detected planets
to younger, more massive, longer-period imaged planets.
These new discoveries will also enable us to calculate the
fundamental properties of planets in wider mass and age
ranges than those currently accessible to direct imaging
alone, examine the rarity of the Earth-Jupiter-Saturn
architecture, and test giant planet formation theories
(Cumming et al. 2008; Wittenmyer et al. 2006, 2011,
2016).
Here, we present the discovery of HR 5183 b, a highly
eccentric planet with a semimajor axis of 18
+6
4
au or-
biting a
V
= 6
.
3 G0 star. HR 5183 has been moni-
tored for more than 20 years as part of the California
Planet Search at Keck/HIRES and the long-duration
RV planet survey at McDonald Observatory. After over
10 years of relatively constant RV measurements, HR
5183 began rapidly accelerating. In 2018, the RV mea-
surements flattened out and turned over, an event as-
sociated with the planet’s periastron passage. As we
discuss later in the paper, this periastron passage event
was information-rich, and allowed precise constraints on
the planet’s orbital parameters even without RV cov-
erage over the entire orbital period. With an orbital
period of 74
+43
22
years, HR 5183 b is the longest-period
planet with a well-constrained orbital period and mini-
mum mass detected with the RV technique.
This paper is organized as follows: in Section 2, we
present our RV measurements of HR 5183. In Section
3, we provide precise estimates of the stellar parame-
ters of HR 5183, and in Section 4, we characterize the
planet HR 5183 b. In Section 5, we describe an ex-
tremely widely-separated (
>
15,000 au) stellar compan-
ion to HD 5183, and present the results of searches for
additional stellar and planetary companions. In Sec-
tion 6, we discuss prospects for multi-method detection
of HR 5183 b. In Section 7, we relate HR 5183 b to
other exoplanet systems, comment on formation scenar-
ios, and conclude.
2.
HIGH-RESOLUTION SPECTRA
We began Doppler monitoring of HR 5183 in 1997
at Keck/HIRES and in 1999 at McDonald/Tull. We
have also monitored HR 5183 on the Automated Planet
Finder (APF) with high cadence since its commissioning
in 2013. The RVs from all three spectrographs are shown
in Figure 1 and tabulated in Table 1.
Table 1
. Radial Velocities and S-index values
Time
RV
RV Unc.
Inst.
S
HK
b
S
HK
Unc.
(BJD - 2440000)
(m s
1
)
(m s
1
)
10463
.
1705
63
.
5
1
.
09
HIRES
a
0.14
0.01
10547
.
042
67
.
93
1
.
16
HIRES
a
0.14
0.01
10838
.
155
59
.
22
1
.
08
HIRES
a
0.14
0.01
10954
.
9271
63
.
3
1
.
61
HIRES
a
0.14
0.01
11200
.
1185
57
.
71
1
.
24
HIRES
a
0.14
0.01
11213
.
9789
51
.
69
9
.
03
TULL
0.15
0.02
Table 1 continued
HR 5183 b
3
Table 1
(continued)
Time
RV
RV Unc.
Inst.
S
HK
b
S
HK
Unc.
(BJD - 2440000)
(m s
1
)
(m s
1
)
11241
.
8948
35
.
6
4
.
08
TULL
0.15
0.02
11274
.
8541
49
.
01
8
.
4
TULL
0.16
0.02
11310
.
9479
63
.
84
1
.
34
HIRES
a
0.14
0.01
11329
.
7947
36
.
45
4
.
72
TULL
0.15
0.02
a
Pre-upgrade HIRES measurement.
b
Note that the
S
HK
values for each instrument do not have the same zero-point.
Pre- and post-upgrade HIRES S-values should be treated independently.
Note
—Table 1 is published in its entirety in the machine-readable format. A
portion is shown here for guidance regarding its form and content.
2.1.
HIRES Spectra
We obtained 78 high-resolution (
R
= 60
,
000) spectra
of HR 5183 with the HIRES spectrograph (Vogt et al.
1994; Cumming et al. 2008; Howard et al. 2010) between
1997 and 2019. HIRES underwent major upgrades in
2004, so for modeling purposes we treat pre- and post-
upgrade HIRES measurements independently (see Sec-
tion 4). Wavelength calibration for each RV measure-
ment was performed with a warm iodine-gas cell placed
in the light path in front of the slit, producing a con-
volved spectrum of the star, iodine gas, and point spread
function. Each spectrum was forward-modeled with a
deconvolved stellar spectrum template (DSST), an at-
las iodine spectrum, and a line spread function (Butler
et al. 1996). This technique is stable at the 2-3
ms
1
level on timescales of more than a decade (Howard &
Fulton 2016).
To monitor chromospheric and stellar spot activity,
we extracted spectral information at and near the Ca II
H and K lines to calculate a Mt. Wilson style S-index
value (following Wright et al. 2004 and Isaacson & Fis-
cher 2010) for measurements taken after the 2004 instru-
ment upgrade. S-index values for HIRES measurements
taken before 2004 were pulled directly from Wright et al.
(2004). These values do not correlate significantly with
time, the RV measurements, or the RV residuals from
the maximum a posteriori (MAP) orbit (see Section 4).
In particular, the S-index values show no trends or cor-
relations with RV measurements on the timescale of the
proposed planet period.
2.2.
Tull Spectra
Between 1999 and 2019, we collected 175 high-
resolution (
R
= 60
,
000) spectra with the Tull Coud ́e
Spectrograph (Tull et al. 1995) on the 2.7 m Harlan J.
Smith telescope as part of the McDonald Observatory
planet search (Cochran et al. 1997; Hatzes et al. 2000).
For all observations, we inserted an iodine absorption
cell into the light path to obtain a precise wavelength
calibration. Combined with a template stellar spectrum,
this allowed us to reconstruct the shape of the instru-
mental PSF at the time of each observation. We used
the RV modeling code
Austral
(Endl et al. 2000) to
compute precise differential RVs.
We typically reach a long-term RV precision of 4 to
6 m s
1
for inactive FGK-type stars with the Tull spec-
trograph. A major advantage of the Tull RV survey is
that the instrumental setup has not been modified over
the duration of the program. For nearly 20 years, we
have been using the same CCD detector, the same io-
dine cell, and the same positions of the Echelle grating
and cross-disperser prism. This assures that there are
no RV zero-point offsets introduced into the RV time
series.
We determined the S-index values from the Ca II H&K
lines in the blue orders of the Tull spectra using the
method outlined in Paulson et al. (2002). These S-index
values also show no trend or correlation with RV mea-
surements over the duration of the observations.
2.3.
APF Spectra
Finally, we obtained 104 spectra of HR 5183 with the
Automated Planet Finder (APF; Radovan et al. 2014;
Vogt et al. 2014) between 2013 and 2019. The APF is
an automated 2.4 meter telescope at Lick Observatory
on Mt. Hamilton, CA. It is equipped with the Levy
Spectrograph, a dedicated high-resolution echelle spec-
trometer that sits at a Nasmyth focus. The Levy Spec-
trograph achieves
R >
120
,
000 and covers a wavelength
range of 374.3-980.0 nm. Spectra of HR 5183 were ob-
served through a warm iodine-gas cell for wavelength
calibration. The RVs were calculated with the pipeline
described in Fulton et al. (2015), which descends from
4
Blunt et al.
the Butler et al. (1996) pipeline, and is essentially identi-
cal to the HIRES reduction pipeline discussed in Section
2.1. As with the HIRES data, we calculate S-index val-
ues following Isaacson & Fischer (2010). These S-index
values similarly appear independent of the RV measure-
ments over the duration of the observations.
3.
STELLAR PROPERTIES
HR 5183 is a nearby slightly evolved G0 star. We
derived precise stellar parameters for HR 5183 using
the method described in Fulton et al. (2018). Briefly,
this method uses Gaia DR2 parallaxes (Gaia Collabo-
ration et al. 2018), spectroscopic effective temperatures
computed from our Keck template spectrum with the
SpecMatch
code (Petigura 2015), and 2MASS photom-
etry (Skrutskie et al. 2006) to compute precise stellar
radii. log
g
, [Fe
/
H], and
v
sin
i
are also calculated from
the Keck spectrum using
SpecMatch
. Stellar mass, age,
and distance are derived using the
isoclassify
1
pack-
age (Huber et al. 2017). The stellar properties derived
from this analysis are presented in Table 2, along with
other useful stellar parameters.
Allen & Monroy-Rodr ́ıguez (2014) found evidence
that HR 5183 is in the halo of the Milky Way using re-
duced proper motion diagrams following Salim & Gould
(2003). However, HR 5183 is younger and more metal-
rich than typical galactic halo objects (Carollo et al.
2016), which led us to scrutinize this claim. To investi-
gate HD 5183’s galactic population membership, we per-
formed a kinematic analysis of its galactic orbit, follow-
ing Johnson et al. (2018). We used the
galpy
2
package
(Bovy 2015) to compute 50 random realizations of galac-
tic positions and U,V,W space velocities for HR 5183
consistent with its Gaia DR2 parameters (Gaia Collab-
oration et al. 2018). For each realization, we then cal-
culated the galactic orbit of HR 5138 in
galpy
’s “MW-
Potential2014” galactic potential. The resulting orbits
never achieve a height above the galactic midplane of
more than 200 pc. This result supports the claim that
HR 5183 is a thin-disk member, and not a halo object.
Table 2
. Stellar Properties
Parameter
Value
Unit
R.A.
13 46 57
hh:mm:ss
Decl.
+06 20 59
dd:mm:ss
HD Name
HD 120066
2MASS ID
J13465711+0621013
Gaia Source ID
3721126409323324416
Parallax
31
.
757
±
0
.
039
mas
K
4
.
85
±
0
.
02
mag
V
6
.
30
mag
T
eff
5794
±
100
K
log
g
4
.
02
±
0
.
1
dex
[Fe
/
H]
0
.
10
±
0
.
06
dex
v
sin
i
3
±
1
kms
1
R
1
.
53
+0
.
06
0
.
05
R
M
1
.
07
±
0
.
04
M
Age
7
.
7
+1
.
4
1
.
2
Gyr
Distance
31
.
49
±
0
.
04
pc
Note
T
eff
, log
g
, [Fe
/
H], and
v
sin
i
were calculated from
the stellar spectrum using the
SpecMatch
code.
R
was
calculated as described in Section 3.
M
, age, and distance
were calculated using the
isoclassify
code.
1
GitHub.com/danxhuber/isoclassify
2
GitHub.com/jobovy/galpy
4.
PLANET PROPERTIES
The curvature we saw in the RVs (see Figure 1) alerted
us to the existence of HR 5138 b, and motivated us to
characterize its orbital properties. We modeled the RV
HR 5183 b
5
40
20
0
20
40
60
80
100
RV [m s
1
]
P = 72.85 yr
e = 0.84
Msini = 3.24 M
J
APF
HIRES
HIRES pre 2004
McDONALD
2000
2010
2020
Year
10000
12000
14000
16000
18000
20000
22000
JD - 2440000
20
0
20
Residuals
17600
17800
18000
18200
18400
18600
JD - 2440000
40
20
0
20
40
60
80
100
RV [m s
1
]
2017
2018
2019
Year
Figure 1
. Top: RVs of HR 5183 from the Keck-HIRES, McDonald-Tull, and APF-Levy spectrographs as a function of time.
Error bars show observational errors and instrument-specific jitter values added in quadrature. The best-fit Keplerian orbit is
shown (blue solid line). Residuals are inset below. Bottom: close-up of the grey region in top plot. The RV curve peaks in
January 2018 during periastron passage, and declines monotonically afterward in all three data sets.
6
Blunt et al.
timeseries using the open-source toolkit
radvel
3
(Ful-
ton et al. 2018). The code and data used to perform
the analysis in this paper are available on GitHub
4
. We
chose to perform this fit using the following parametriza-
tion of the Keplerian RV function: log
P
, T
C
,
e
cos
ω
,
e
sin
ω
, and log
K
. We imposed uninformative uni-
form priors on each of these parameters except log
P
,
for which we defined an “informative baseline prior.”
Because we detected a long-period planet by observing
a single, short-duration event (the planet’s periastron
passage), we made an analogy to detection by transit
and defined the following prior on period, often used
in the exoplanet transit community (e.g., Kipping 2018;
Vanderburg et al. 2016):
p
(
P,t
d
,B
) =
1
if
P
t
d
< B
(
B
+
t
d
)
/P
else
(1)
where
t
d
is the duration of the event (in this case, the
periastron passage),
P
is the orbital period, and
B
is
the observing baseline. See Section 4.1 for a justifica-
tion of this choice of prior and detailed comparison to
other possible models and prior parameterizations. Un-
like in the case of a transit detection, the “duration”
of HR 5183’s periastron passage event is not easily de-
fined. We performed fits with
t
d
= 0 and
t
d
= 3
.
5 yr,
ultimately finding that the results were indistinguish-
able and sidestepping this issue. We adopted
t
d
= 0 for
convenience.
We also included jitter (
σ
) and RV offset (
γ
) terms
for each of our four RV datasets (we treated HIRES pre-
2004 and post-2004 measurements as separate data sets
in our fit; see Section 2.1). We assumed uninformative
uniform priors on each of these instrumental terms as
well. The logarithm of the complete likelihood for this
model is:
ln
L
=
1
2
n
i
=0
[
(
v
i
M
i
)
2
(
σ
i
+
σ
jit
,i
)
2
+ 2ln
2
π
(
σ
2
i
+
σ
2
jit
,i
)
1
2
]
(2)
where n is the total number of RV measurements,
v
i
is the
i
th RV measurement,
σ
i
is its uncertainty,
M
i
is the Keplerian model prediction for observation
i
, and
σ
jit
,i
is the jitter parameter for the instrument that took
observation
i
(Fulton et al. 2016).
We computed the MAP fit with
radvel
, obtaining
an orbital period of 72.85 years, a minimum mass of
3.24
M
J
, and an eccentricity of 0.84. This orbital solu-
3
https://radvel.readthedocs.io/en/latest
4
https://github.com/California-Planet-Search/planet-pi
tion is shown in Figure 1, and a bird’s-eye view compar-
ing this orbit to the orbits of the solar system planets
is shown in Figure 2. We next performed an Affine-
invariant Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) explo-
ration of the parameter space with the ensemble sam-
pler
emcee
5
(Foreman-Mackey et al. 2013). Our MCMC
analysis used 8 ensembles of 50 walkers and ran for 1552
steps per walker, achieving a maximum Gelman-Rubin
(GR; Gelman et al. 2003) statistic of 1.001. A corner
plot showing posterior distributions and covariances be-
tween
T
P
,
P
,
M
sin
i
,
a
,
a
(1
e
),
e
, and
ω
is shown in
Figure 3. These values are also recorded in Table 3.
30
20
10
0
10
20
30
[au]
30
20
10
0
10
20
30
[au]
Figure 2
. The MAP orbit of HR 5183 b compared to the
orbits of the planets in our solar system (blue: Neptune,
teal: Uranus, purple: Saturn, red: Jupiter, grey: Mars, black
dashed: HR 5183 b). The sizes of the colored circles show the
relative sizes of the solar system planets (not to scale with
respect to their orbits). We assume a radius of 1 R
J
for HR
5183 b. The orbital locations of the planets are computed
on 7-31-2019, approximately 1.5 years after the periastron
passage of HR 5183 b. HR 5183 b’s Ω and
i
are set to
arbitrary values. At periastron, HR 5183 b is closer to its
star than our asteroid belt is to the Sun, and at apastron, it
is more distant than Neptune.
4.1.
Model Choice
We performed three additional orbit fits to evaluate
our choice of model. First, we performed two fits with-
out informative baseline priors on log
P
: one fitting in
P
and
K
(as opposed to log
P
and log
K
), and another
in log
P
(fitting in log
P
versus
P
imposes an implicit
5
GitHub.com/dfm/emcee
HR 5183 b
7
Jeffrey’s prior on
P
). Period posteriors obtained from
these two models and the informative prior are com-
piled in Table 4. All three orbital period posteriors are
consistent within 1-
σ
, but the informative baseline prior
pushes the median orbital period to shorter values. Nei-
ther of these priors significantly change the posteriors
on the other orbital parameters; for example, fitting in
log
P
gives
M
sin
i
= 3
.
28
+0
.
16
0
.
15
M
J
and e = 0
.
87
±
0
.
05.
The slight dependence of the solution on our prior choice
ultimately points to the need for more data, but in the
meantime we adopt the informative prior.
Next, we performed a fit including a ̇
γ
parameter to
account for potential additional wider-separation com-
panions influencing the RV signal of the star. Adding
this free parameter has the effect of pushing the eccen-
tricity posterior to higher values (e = 0
.
92
±
0
.
03) and
the period posterior to lower values (P = 71
.
87
+52
.
26
27
.
07
yr),
but the posterior distribution of ̇
γ
is consistent with 0
( ̇
γ
= 0
.
12
+0
.
22
0
.
19
m s
1
yr
1
). The adopted model has
lower BIC (∆BIC = 5.4) and AIC values (∆AIC = 1.7),
indicating that the added free parameter does not sub-
stantially improve the fit. We can’t unequivocally rule
out a trend, but since including one is not statistically
warranted and does not affect the conclusions of the pa-
per, we adopt the fit with no trend.
The lack of an unambiguous trend in the RVs is con-
sistent with our failure to detect companion objects in
the HST and NaCo images (see Section 3 and Appendix
B). The possible bound companion at 15,000 au (Section
5.2.1) would not produce a measurable ̇
γ
.
Table 3
. Fit Parameters & Derived Planet Properties
Parameter
Median Value & 68% CI
MAP Value
Unit
ln
P
10
.
21
+0
.
46
0
.
35
10.2
ln(days)
T
c
18965
+44
40
18964
JD - 2440000
e
cos
ω
0
.
86
±
0
.
02
0.86
e
sin
ω
0
.
32
±
0
.
03
-0.32
ln
K
3
.
64
±
0
.
01
3.64
ln(m s
1
)
σ
(HIRES pre-upgrade)
3
.
4
+0
.
8
0
.
6
3.09
m s
1
σ
(HIRES post-upgrade)
3
.
3
±
0
.
4
3.16
m s
1
σ
(Tull)
5
.
8
+0
.
6
0
.
5
5.67
m s
1
σ
(APF)
3
.
7
+0
.
5
0
.
4
3.58
m s
1
γ
(HIRES pre-upgrade)
52
.
6
+1
.
3
1
.
5
-52.5
m s
1
γ
(HIRES post-upgrade)
52
.
4
+2
.
0
2
.
1
-52.4
m s
1
γ
(Tull)
19
.
2
+1
.
9
2
.
1
-19
m s
1
γ
(APF)
47
.
2
+2
.
0
2
.
2
-47.2
m s
1
P
74
+43
22
72.85
yr
K
38
.
25
+0
.
58
0
.
55
38.21
ms
1
e
0
.
84
±
0
.
04
0.84
ω
0
.
35
±
0
.
03
-0.35
rad
T
P
58121
±
12
58120.0
JD - 2440000
M
sin
i
3
.
23
+0
.
15
0
.
14
3.24
M
J
a
18
+6
4
18.0
au
a
(1
e
)
2
.
88
+0
.
09
0
.
08
2.89
au
T
eq
(peri)
171
.
0
+5
.
2
5
.
1
170.94
K
T
eq
(apo)
50
.
2
+7
.
0
7
.
6
50.58
K
Note
T
eq
values were calculated assuming a visible albedo of 0.5.
Note
ω
refers to the orbit of the star HR 5183 induced by the planet HR 5183 b.
8
Blunt et al.
Table 4
. Period Prior Comparison
Prior
Median Period & 68% CI
uniform in
P
&
K
125
+113
54
yr
uniform in log
P
& log
K
103
+103
41
yr
inf. baseline prior (adopted)
74
+43
22
yr
4.2.
Orbit Information Density
Our measurements of this planet’s properties may
seem surprisingly precise (see Table 3) given observa-
tions spanning only about one third of the orbit. These
constraints are possible because we tracked the system
through periastron passage, when the information den-
sity of the Keplerian signal is highest.
High-eccentricity orbits have unique shapes that sen-
sitively depend on
e
and
ω
(see Fig. 2 of Howard &
Fulton 2016 for a helpful visualization). The shape of
the HR 5183 RV curve is fit only by a narrow range of
these parameters, as Figure 3 shows.
The relatively flat RV curve from
1998–2015 followed
by a sharp uptick and subsequent turnover are consis-
tent only with
e
'
0
.
8 and
ω
' −
0
.
4. All other Keple-
rian curves have
shapes
that are inconsistent with our
measurements. More complicated models involving ad-
ditional planets or a ̇
γ
term are also excluded by the
peculiar RV pattern.
We offer two arguments to build intuition. First,
imagine decomposing the RV fitting into a process that
matches three orbital properties of the Keplerian curve:
1) the shape (from
e
and
ω
); 2) the vertical scale (
K
);
and 3) the horizontal scale (
P
). Once the shape has
been determined by matching the appropriate Keplerian
curve, the horizontal and vertical scales can be measured
using RVs spanning less than a full orbit, provided the
information-rich close approach is covered. Second, con-
sider the how the planet’s speed varies over its orbit. We
can define the “fastest half orbit” as the portion of an
orbit near closest approach, when the true anomaly (
f
)
is between
π/
2 and
π/
2. The time for the planet to
pass through the fastest half orbit,
t
fho
, can be computed
using the relationship between
f
and time (
t
),
df
=
2
π
P
1
e
2
(
a
r
)
2
dt,
(3)
where
r
is the distance between the orbiting planet and
the star (Seager 2010, Eq. 2.44). Substituting an ex-
pression for
r
(
f
) (Seager 2010, Eq. 2.20),
t
fho
=
P
(1
e
2
)
3
/
2
2
π
π/
2
π/
2
df
1 +
e
cos
f
.
(4)
For a circular orbit,
t
fho
integrates to
P/
2, as ex-
pected. Eccentric orbits have much shorter timescales
of close approach though. Numerically integrating Eq. 4
with
e
= 0
.
84, we find
t
fho
P/
18
.
6. That is, the planet
completes the fastest half of its orbit nearly an order of
magnitude more quickly than in the circular case. While
our fitting procedure did not actually measure
t
fho
and
scale it by a factor of 18.6 to determine
P
, this exercise
illustrates how highly eccentric orbits contain informa-
tion related to orbital period on short timescales, and
thus allow us to measure
P
with higher precision than
one might expect.
This is not to say that we have ruled out hundred-year
or more periods and higher (
'
0.91) eccentricities. Such
orbits appear in our posterior, but because there is less
posterior volume in this region of parameter space, they
are less probable overall.
5.
ADDITIONAL BOUND COMPANIONS
5.1.
Search for Additional Planets in the System
We searched for other significant periodic signals in
the RV data using the
χ
2
difference technique described
in Howard & Fulton (2016). In brief, we started by
calculating the
χ
2
of a flat line fit to the RVs, and in-
jecting additional Keplerian orbits into the model. We
calculated the change in
χ
2
(∆
χ
2
) when including each
additional Keplerian orbit over a grid of periods and ec-
centricities. We constructed a periodogram of the ∆
χ
2
values as a function of trial period and fit the distribu-
tion of periodogram peak heights to infer an empirical
false alarm probability (eFAP) for each detected peak.
We detected no signals with an empirical false-alarm
probability (eFAP) greater than 1%, indicating no ad-
ditional planetary companions down to our sensitivity
limits.
We characterized our sensitivity limits over a grid
of semimajor axes and
M
sin
i
values by applying the
search algorithm described above to each injected plan-
etary signal. The results of this analysis are shown in
Figure 4. As expected, we are most sensitive to Jupiter-
mass and heavier planets with
a <
30 au. Our data are
not sensitive to Earth-mass planets. HR 5183 b itself
is at our detection limits because of its large semimajor
HR 5183 b
9
50
100
150
200
250
P [yr]
2.7
3.0
3.3
3.6
3.9
Msin
i
[M
J
]
16
24
32
40
a [au]
2.6
2.8
3.0
3.2
a(1-e) [au]
0.75
0.80
0.85
0.90
e
18075
18100
18125
18150
18175
T
P
[JD - 2440000]
28
24
20
16
12
[deg]
50
100
150
200
250
P [yr]
2.7
3.0
3.3
3.6
3.9
Msin
i
[M
J
]
16
24
32
40
a [au]
2.6
2.8
3.0
3.2
a(1-e) [au]
0.75
0.80
0.85
0.90
e
28
24
20
16
12
[deg]
Figure 3
. Corner plot displaying posterior distributions and covariances of HR 5183 b orbital parameters of interest: time
of periastron passage (T
P
), orbital period (
P
), minimum mass (
M
sin
i
), semimajor axis (
a
), minimum orbital separation
(
a
(1
e
)), eccentricity (
e
), and argument of periastron (
ω
). Importantly, these probability distributions were derived from the
fitted posteriors; among the parameters shown here, only T
P
is actually a parameter in the fit. Time of periastron passage,
minimum mass and minimum orbital separation are very well constrained, while orbital period remains uncertain and correlated
with eccentricity.