• DOI:10.3847/1538-3881/ac517f
• Corpus ID: 246442169

A Possible Alignment Between the Orbits of Planetary Systems and their Visual Binary Companions

@article{Christian2022APA,
  title={A Possible Alignment Between the Orbits of Planetary Systems and their Visual Binary Companions},
  author={Sam Christian and Andrew M. Vanderburg and Juliette C. Becker and Daniel A. Yahalomi and Logan A. Pearce and George Zhou and Karen A. Collins and Adam L. Kraus and Keivan G. Stassun and Zoe de Beurs and George R. Ricker and Roland K. Vanderspek and David W. Latham and Joshua N. Winn and Sara Seager and Jon M. Jenkins and Lyu Abe and Karim Agabi and Pedro J. Amado and David Baker and Khalid Barkaoui and Zouhair Benkhaldoun and Paul B Benni and J. Berberian and Perry L. Berlind and Allyson Bieryla and Emma Esparza-Borges and Michael Bowen and Peyton Brown and Lars A. Buchhave and Christopher J. Burke and Marco Buttu and Charles Cadieux and Douglas A. Caldwell and David Charbonneau and Nikita Chazov and Sudhish Chimaladinne and Kevin I. Collins and Deven Combs and Dennis M. Conti and Nicolas Crouzet and Jerome P. de Leon and Shila Deljookorani and Brendan Diamond and Ren{\'e} Doyon and Diana Dragomir and Georgina Dransfield and Zahra Essack and Phil Evans and Akihiko Fukui and Tianjun Gan and Gilbert A. Esquerdo and Micha{\"e}l Gillon and Eric Girardin and Pere Guerra and Tristan Guillot and E.K.K. Habich and Andreea I. Henriksen and Nora Hoch and Keisuke Isogai and Emmanuel Jehin and Eric L. N. Jensen and Marshall C. Johnson and John H. Livingston and John F. Kielkopf and Kingsley Kim and Kiyoe Kawauchi and Vadim Krushinsky and Veronica Kunzle and Didier Laloum and Dominic J St Leger and Pablo Lewin and Franco Mallia and Bob Massey and Mayuko Mori and K. K. Mcleod and Djamel M'ekarnia and Ismael Mireles and Nikolay N. Mishevskiy and Motohide Tamura and Felipe Murgas and Norio Narita and Ram{\'o}n Naves and Peter F. Nelson and Hugh P. Osborn and Enric Palle and Hannu Parviainen and Peter P. Plavchan and Francisco J. Pozuelos and Markus Rabus and Howard M. Relles and Cristina Rodr'iguez L'opez and Samuel N. Quinn and François-Xavier Schmider and Joshua E. Schlieder and Richard P. Schwarz and Avi Shporer and Laurie Sibbald and Gregor Srdo{\vc} and Caitlin Stibbards and Hannah Stickler and Olga Su{\'a}rez and Christopher Stockdale and T. G. Tan and Yuka Terada and Amaury H. M. J. Triaud and Ren{\'e} Tronsgaard and William C. Waalkes and Gavin Wang and Noriharu Watanabe and Marie-Sainte Wenceslas and Geof Wingham and Justin M. Wittrock and Carl A. Ziegler},
  journal={The Astronomical Journal},
  year={2022},
  volume={163}
}

• S. Christian, A. Vanderburg, +111 authors C. Ziegler
• Published 31 January 2022
• Geology, Physics
• The Astronomical Journal

Astronomers do not have a complete picture of the effects of wide-binary companions (semimajor axes greater than 100 au) on the formation and evolution of exoplanets. We investigate these effects using new data from Gaia Early Data Release 3 and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission to characterize wide-binary systems with transiting exoplanets. We identify a sample of 67 systems of transiting exoplanet candidates (with well-determined, edge-on orbital inclinations) that reside in wide visual binary systems. We derive limits on orbital parameters for the wide-binary systems and measure the minimum difference in orbital inclination between the binary and planet orbits. We determine that there is statistically significant difference in the inclination distribution of wide-binary systems with transiting planets compared to a control sample, with the probability that the two distributions are the same being 0.0037. This implies that there is an overabundance of planets in binary systems whose orbits are aligned with those of the binary. The overabundance of aligned systems appears to primarily have semimajor axes less than 700 au. We investigate some effects that could cause the alignment and conclude that a torque caused by a misaligned binary companion on the protoplanetary disk is the most promising explanation.