Kepler-80 Revisited: Assessing the Participation of a Newly Discovered Planet in the Resonant Chain

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the chain of resonances in the Kepler-80 system and evaluate the impact that the additional member of the resonant chain discovered by Shallue & Vanderburg has on the dynamics of the system and the physical parameters that can be recovered by a fit to the transit timing variations (TTVs). Ultimately, we calculate the mass of Kepler-80 g to be 0.8 ± 0.3 M _⊕ when assuming all planets have zero eccentricity, and 1.0 ± 0.3 M _⊕ when relaxing that assumption. We show that the outer five planets are in successive three-body mean-motion resonances (MMRs). We assess the current state of two-body MMRs in the system and find that the planets do not appear to be in two-body MMRs. We find that while the existence of the additional member of the resonant chain does not significantly alter the character of the Kepler-80 three-body MMRs, it can alter the physical parameters derived from the TTVs, suggesting caution should be applied when drawing conclusions from TTVs for potentially incomplete systems. We also compare our results to those of MacDonald et al., who perform a similar analysis on the same system with a different method. Although the results of this work and MacDonald et al. show that different fit methodologies and underlying assumptions can result in different measured orbital parameters, the most secure conclusion is that which holds true across all lines of analysis: Kepler-80 contains a chain of planets in three-body MMRs but not in two-body MMRs.

Keywords

• Exoplanet dynamics
• Exoplanet systems
• Exoplanet astronomy