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A Model-independent Mass and Moderate Eccentricity for β Pic b

  • Authors: Trent J. Dupuy, Timothy D. Brandt, Kaitlin Kratter, and Brendan P. Bowler

2019 The Astrophysical Journal Letters 871 L4.

  • Provider: AAS Journals

Caption: Figure 1.

Our joint orbit fit to relative astrometry (left panel), RVs (middle panel), and absolute astrometry of the host star from HGCA (right panel). In all panels, the thick black line indicates the highest likelihood orbit, and thin lines are 100 orbits drawn randomly from our posterior distribution colored according to orbital eccentricity. Left panel: small filled circles along the maximum likelihood deprojected orbit indicate epochs spaced by 2 yr from 2002 until 2022. The dotted line indicates periastron. Open symbols of different shapes and colors are plotted along the maximum likelihood orbit at the epochs corresponding to the relative astrometry used in our analysis. Middle panel: over 103 RVs for β Pic from Lagrange et al. (2012) are plotted as small blue dots, displaying a large jitter of 269 ± 6 m s−1. The bottom panel shows β Pic b’s RV relative to its host star along with the measurement of −15.4 ± 1.7 km s−1 from Snellen et al. (2014). Right panel: each plotted measurement is the difference between the proper motion measured in one mission (Hipparcos in 1991.3 or Gaia in 2015.6) and the proper motion computed from the change in R.A. and decl. between the two missions. The strongest constraint on acceleration caused by β Pic b comes from Hipparcos given the large astrometric errors for β Pic in Gaia DR2.

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