Bayesian analysis of the radial velocities of HD 11506 reveals another planetary companion

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of Bayesian analysis in radial velocity data, revealing a second planetary companion around HD 11506 with high confidence, and emphasizing the importance of treating stellar jitter as a free parameter.

Contribution

The study applies Bayesian methods with MCMC to reanalyze radial velocity data, uncovering an additional planet and highlighting the impact of jitter modeling on orbital parameter estimation.

Findings

Identification of a second planet with 0.8 MJup and ~0.5 year period.

Revised orbital parameters for the known planet when jitter is free.

High confidence evidence for the additional planetary companion.

Abstract

We aim to demonstrate the efficiency of a Bayesian approach in analysing radial velocity data by reanalysing a set of radial velocity measurements. We present Bayesian analysis of a recently published set of radial velocity measurements known to contain the signal of one extrasolar planetary candidate, namely, HD 11506. The analysis is conducted using the Markov chain Monte Carlo method and the resulting distributions of orbital parameters are tested by performing direct integration of randomly selected samples with the Bulirsch-Stoer method. The magnitude of the stellar radial velocity variability, known as jitter, is treated as a free parameter with no assumptions about its magnitude. We show that the orbital parameters of the planet known to be present in the data correspond to a different solution when the jitter is allowed to be a free parameter. We also show evidence of an additional candidate, a 0.8 MJup planet with period of about 0.5 yr in orbit around HD 11506. This second planet is inferred to be present with a high level of confidence.