Systemic: A Testbed For Characterizing the Detection of Extrasolar Planets. I. The Systemic Console Package

TL;DR

The paper introduces the systemic Console, a comprehensive software tool for analyzing and fitting radial velocity and transit data to characterize exoplanetary systems, demonstrated on the HD128311 system.

Contribution

It presents a new software package that integrates analysis tools for exoplanet detection and characterization from multiple observational methods.

Findings

The Console effectively analyzes radial velocity data for exoplanet systems.

Combined radial velocity and transit timing data improve dynamical system characterization.

Application to HD128311 illustrates the software's capabilities and limitations.

Abstract

We present the systemic Console, a new all-in-one, general-purpose software package for the analysis and combined multiparameter fitting of Doppler radial velocity (RV) and transit timing observations. We give an overview of the computational algorithms implemented in the Console, and describe the tools offered for streamlining the characterization of planetary systems. We illustrate the capabilities of the package by analyzing an updated radial velocity data set for the HD128311 planetary system. HD128311 harbors a pair of planets that appear to be participating in a 2:1 mean motion resonance. We show that the dynamical configuration cannot be fully determined from the current data. We find that if a planetary system like HD128311 is found to undergo transits, then self-consistent Newtonian fits to combined radial velocity data and a small number of timing measurements of transit midpoints can provide an immediate and vastly improved characterization of the planet's dynamical state.