Checking Stability Of Planet Orbits In Multiple-planet Systems

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the stability of planetary orbits in multi-planet systems using an orbit integrator to analyze the detectability of Earth-mass exoplanets in the context of the SIM Lite mission.

Contribution

It introduces an orbit integrator implementation for stability analysis and assesses its effectiveness in blind detection scenarios of multi-planet systems.

Findings

Orbit integrator helps distinguish true planets from false positives.

Stability analysis can reveal the influence of undetected planets.

Method is useful for assessing long-term orbital stability.

Abstract

The SIM Lite mission will undertake several planet surveys. One of them, the Deep Planet Survey, is designed to detect Earth-mass exoplanets in the habitable zones of nearby main sequence stars. A double blind study has been conducted to assess the capability of SIM to detect such small planets in a multi-planet system where several giant planets might be present. One of the tools which helped in deciding if the detected planets were actual was an orbit integrator using the publicly available HNBody code so that the orbit solutions could be analyzed in terms of temporal stability over many orbits. In this contribution, we describe the implementation of this integrator and analyze the different blind test solutions. We discuss also the usefulness of this method given that some planets might be not detected but still affect the overall stability of the system.