Abstract
Abstract Planetary architectures remain unexplored for the vast majority of exoplanetary systems, even among the closest ones, with potentially hundreds of planets still “hidden” from our knowledge. Dynamite is a powerful software package that can predict the presence and properties of these yet-undiscovered planets. We have significantly expanded the integrative capabilities of Dynamite, which now allows for (i) planets of unknown inclinations alongside planets of known inclinations, (ii) population statistics and model distributions for the eccentricity of planetary orbits, and (iii) three different dynamical stability criteria. We demonstrate the new capabilities with a study of the HD 219134 exoplanet system consisting of four confirmed planets and two likely candidates, where five of the likely planets and candiates are Neptune-sized or below with orbital periods less than 100 days. By integrating the known data for the HD 219134 planetary system with contextual and statistical exoplanet population information, we tested different system architecture hypotheses to determine their likely dynamical stability. Our results provide support for the planet candidates, and we predict at least two additional planets in this system. We also deploy Dynamite on analogs of the inner solar system by excluding Venus or Earth from the input parameters to test Dynamite's predictive power. Our analysis finds that the system remains stable while also recovering the excluded planets, demonstrating the increasing capability of Dynamite to accurately and precisely model the parameters of additional planets in multiplanet systems.
Highlights
Understanding the stability of planetary systems and searching for a form of order in their dynamics has long been a path of study for astronomers, first for our own Solar System and in other systems discovered over the past three decades
We present an integrated analysis of the HD 219134 planetary system, the closest known 6-planet system, using an updated version of Dynamite
(3) Utilizing both the simple mutual Hill radius dynamical stability criterion and the updated N-body integration spectral fraction analysis, in Hypotheses H[a] and H[c] we find evidence for predicted planet PxP–1 with orbital period ∼12 days, which would dynamically pack the inner system out to planet g
Summary
Understanding the stability of planetary systems and searching for a form of order in their dynamics has long been a path of study for astronomers, first for our own Solar System and in other systems discovered over the past three decades. The Dynamite (Dietrich & Apai 2020) software package provides a unique capability for integrated analysis to combine specific (but often uncertain and incomplete) data of an exoplanet system with population-level statistical information and an empirical rule or other criterion for orbital dynamical stability. This analysis predicts the presence and parameters of additional “hidden” planets in these planetary systems, which provides
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