Exploring Whether Super-Puffs Can Be Explained as Ringed Exoplanets

TL;DR

This paper investigates whether super-puffs, planets with large radii and low densities, could be explained as ringed planets, analyzing their properties and the observational requirements to test this hypothesis.

Contribution

It explores the ringed planet hypothesis for super-puffs, identifying which cases are plausible and proposing observational strategies to test this idea.

Findings

Some super-puffs can be explained as ringed planets.

Rings around super-puffs are likely rocky or porous due to proximity to stars.

Testing the ring hypothesis requires high-precision photometry (~10-50 ppm).

Abstract

An intriguing, growing class of planets are the "super-puffs," objects with exceptionally large radii for their masses and thus correspondingly low densities ($\lesssim0.3\rm\,g\,cm^{-3}$). Here we consider whether they could have large inferred radii because they are in fact ringed. This would naturally explain why super-puffs have thus far only shown featureless transit spectra. We find that this hypothesis can work in some cases but not all. The close proximity of the super-puffs to their parent stars necessitates rings with a rocky rather than icy composition. This limits the radius of the rings, and makes it challenging to explain the large size of Kepler 51b, 51c, 51d, and 79d unless the rings are composed of porous material. Furthermore, the short tidal locking timescales for Kepler 18d, 223d, and 223e mean that these planets may be spinning too slowly, resulting in a small oblateness and rings that are warped by their parent star. Kepler 87c and 177c have the best chance of being explained by rings. Using transit simulations, we show that testing this hypothesis requires photometry with a precision of somewhere between ~10 ppm and ~50 ppm, which roughly scales with the ratio of the planet and star's radii. We conclude with a note about the recently discovered super-puff HIP 41378f.