Anomalous lightcurves of young tilted exorings

Mario Sucerquia (1), J.A. Alvarado-Montes (1), Vanesa Ramírez (1), Jorge I. Zuluaga (1) ((1) SEAP/IF/UdeA)
(Submitted on 15 Aug 2017)

Despite the success of discovering transiting exoplanets, several recently observed objects (e.g. KIC-8462852, J1407b) exhibit irregular and variable transit signals, whose appropriate interpretation in terms of a spherical single object has been challenging, if not impossible. In the aforementioned examples the presence of a ring-like structure has been proposed for explaining the unconventional data. Thus, in this paper we study the dynamics of a tilted exoring, and the role that the Lidov-Kozai mechanism may have to explain irregular and anomalous transit signals of close-in ringed planets, as well as the rings’ early evolutionary stages. To that end, we performed numerical simulations and semi-analytical calculations of the evolving ring’s properties and their related transit observables. We found that tilted ringed structures undergo short-term changes in shape and orientation that are manifested as strong variations of transit depth and contact times, even between consecutive eclipses. Any detected anomaly in transit characteristics may lead to a miscalculation of the system’s properties (planetary radius, semi-major axis, stellar density and others). Moreover, oscillating ring-like structures may account for the strangeness of some light-curve features in already known and future discovered exoplanets.

Comments:    Submited to MNRAS Letters. 5 pages, 4 figures
Subjects:    Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as:    arXiv:1708.04600 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:1708.04600v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Mario Sucerquia [view email]
[v1] Tue, 15 Aug 2017 17:15:17 GMT (2122kb,D)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.04600