The TESS-Keck survey. IV. Rvel for WASP-107

DOI

We measured the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect of WASP-107b during a single transit with Keck/HIRES. We found the sky-projected inclination of WASP-107b's orbit, relative to its host star's rotation axis, to be |{lambda}|=118_-19_^+38^degrees. This confirms the misaligned/polar orbit that was previously suggested from spot-crossing events and adds WASP-107b to the growing population of hot Neptunes in polar orbits around cool stars. WASP-107b is also the fourth such planet to have a known distant planetary companion. We examined several dynamical pathways by which this companion could have induced such an obliquity in WASP-107b. We find that nodal precession and disk dispersal-driven tilting can both explain the current orbital geometry while Kozai-Lidov cycles are suppressed by general relativity. While each hypothesis requires a mutual inclination between the two planets, nodal precession requires a much larger angle, which for WASP-107 is on the threshold of detectability with future Gaia astrometric data. As nodal precession has no stellar type dependence, but disk dispersal-driven tilting does, distinguishing between these two models is best done on the population level. Finding and characterizing more extrasolar systems like WASP-107 will additionally help distinguish whether the distribution of hot-Neptune obliquities is a dichotomy of aligned and polar orbits or if we are uniformly sampling obliquities during nodal precession cycles.

Identifier
DOI http://doi.org/10.26093/cds/vizier.51610119
Source https://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/lp/custom/CDS.VizieR/J/AJ/161/119
Related Identifier https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/AJ/161/119
Related Identifier http://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/AJ/161/119
Metadata Access http://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/pmh/pubreg.xml?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_b2find&identifier=ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/AJ/161/119
Provenance
Creator Rubenzahl R.A.; Dai F.; Howard A.W.; Chontos A.; Giacalone S.; Lubin J.,Rosenthal L.J.; Isaacson H.; Batalha N.M.; Crossfield I.J.M.; Dressing C.,Fulton B.; Huber D.; Kane S.R.; Petigura E.A.; Robertson P.; Roy A.,Weiss L.M.; Beard C.; Hill M.L.; Mayo A.; Mocnik T.; Murphy J.M.A.,Scarsdale N.
Publisher CDS
Publication Year 2021
Rights https://cds.unistra.fr/vizier-org/licences_vizier.html
OpenAccess true
Contact CDS support team <cds-question(at)unistra.fr>
Representation
Resource Type Dataset; AstroObjects
Discipline Astrophysics and Astronomy; Exoplanet Astronomy; Natural Sciences; Observational Astronomy; Physics; Stellar Astronomy