Determining true mass of RV exoplanets with Gaia

DOI

Mass is one of the most important parameters for determining the true nature of an astronomical object. Yet, many published exoplan- ets lack a measurement of their true mass, in particular those detected as a result of radial-velocity (RV) variations of their host star. For those examples, only the minimum mass, or msini, is known, owing to the insensitivity of RVs to the inclination of the detected orbit compared to the plane of the sky. The mass that is given in databases is generally that of an assumed edge-on system (~90{deg}), but many other inclinations are possible, even extreme values closer to 0{deg} (face-on). In such a case, the mass of the published object could be strongly underestimated by up to two orders of magnitude. In the present study, we use GASTON, a recently developed tool taking advantage of the voluminous Gaia astrometric database to constrain the inclination and true mass of several hundreds of published exoplanet candidates. We find 9 exoplanet candidates in the stellar or brown dwarf (BD) domain, among which 6 were never characterized. We show that 30 Ari B b, HD 141937 b, HD 148427 b, HD 6718 b, HIP 65891 b, and HD 16760 b have masses larger than 13.5 M_J_ at 3{sigma}. We also confirm the planetary nature of 27 exoplanets, including HD 10180 c, d and g. Studying the orbital periods, eccentricities, and host-star metallicities in the BD domain, we found distributions with respect to true masses consistent with other publications. The distribution of orbital periods shows of a void of BD detections below ~100d, while eccentricity and metallicity distributions agree with a transition between BDs similar to planets and BDs similar to stars in the range 40-50M_J_.

Cone search capability for table J/A+A/645/A7/table3 (Properties (Simbad) and astrometric data (DR1 Gaia archive) for 659 host stars of 755 exoplanets (corrected version, 29-Sep-2021))

Identifier
DOI http://doi.org/10.26093/cds/vizier.36450007
Source https://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/lp/custom/CDS.VizieR/J/A+A/645/A7
Related Identifier https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/A+A/645/A7
Related Identifier http://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/A+A/645/A7
Metadata Access http://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/pmh/pubreg.xml?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_b2find&identifier=ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/A+A/645/A7
Provenance
Creator Kiefer F.; Hebrard G.; A. Lecavelier des Etangs; E. Martioli; S. Dalal,Vidal-Madjar A.
Publisher CDS
Publication Year 2020
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 Astrophysical Processes; Astrophysics and Astronomy; Exoplanet Astronomy; Natural Sciences; Observational Astronomy; Physics; Stellar Astronomy