An exact, generalised Laplace resonance in the HR 8799 planetary system

TL;DR

This paper develops an exact, self-consistent N-body model of the HR 8799 planetary system, revealing a stable Laplace resonance chain and constraining planetary masses and orbital architecture using astrometry and debris disc data.

Contribution

It introduces an exact periodic configuration approach to model the long-term stability of HR 8799, improving upon previous approximate methods.

Findings

Confirmed a stable Laplace resonance chain in HR 8799

Determined planetary masses consistent with thermodynamic models

Constrained orbital architecture and debris disc structure

Abstract

A system of four super-Jupiter planets around HR 8799 is the first multi-planet configuration discovered via the direct imaging technique. Despite over decade of research, the system's architecture remains not fully resolved. The main difficulty comes from still narrow observing window of ~20 years that covers small arcs of orbits with periods from roughly 50 to 500 years. Soon after the discovery it became clear that unconstrained best-fitting astrometric configurations self-disrupt rapidly, due to strong mutual gravitational interactions between ~10-Jupiter-mass companions. Recently, we showed that the HR 8799 system may be long term stable when locked in a generalized Laplace 8:4:2:1 mean motion resonance (MMR) chain, and we constrained its orbits through the planetary migration. Here we qualitatively improve this approach by considering the MMR in terms of an exactly periodic configuration. This assumption enables us to construct for the first time the self-consistent $N$-body model of the long-term stable orbital architecture, using only available astrometric positions of the planets relative to the star. We independently determine planetary masses, which are consistent with thermodynamic evolution, and the parallax overlapping to $1\sigma$ with the most recent GAIA DR2 value. We also determine the global structure of the inner and outer debris discs in the [8, 600] au range, consistent with the updated orbital solution.