On the Detection of Non-Transiting Hot Jupiters in Multiple-Planet Systems

Sarah Millholland, Songhu Wang, Gregory Laughlin
(Submitted on 18 Feb 2016)

We outline a photometric method for detecting the presence of a non-transiting short-period giant planet in a planetary system harboring one or more longer period transiting planets. Within a prospective system of the type that we consider, a hot Jupiter on an interior orbit inclined to the line-of-sight signals its presence through approximately sinusoidal full-phase photometric variations in the stellar light curve, correlated with astrometrically induced transit timing variations for exterior transiting planets. Systems containing a hot Jupiter along with a low-mass outer planet or planets on inclined orbits are a predicted hallmark of in situ accretion for hot Jupiters, and their presence can thus be used to test planetary formation theories. We outline the prospects for detecting non-transiting hot Jupiters using photometric data from typical Kepler objects of interest (KOIs). As a demonstration of the technique, we perform a brief assessment of Kepler candidates and identify a potential non-transiting hot Jupiter in the KOI-1858 system. Candidate non-transiting hot Jupiters can be readily confirmed with a small number of Doppler velocity observations, even for stars with V?14.

Comments: 5 pages, 5 figures, submitted to ApJ Letters
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:1602.05674 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:1602.05674v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Sarah Millholland
[v1] Thu, 18 Feb 2016 04:01:20 GMT (1706kb)
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.05674