Mapping the Orbital Landscape of Perturbing Planet Solutions for Single-Planet Systems with TTVs

TL;DR

This paper maps the complex solution space of perturbing planets causing TTVs in single-planet systems, providing analytical tools and a Bayesian method to distinguish between planetary and lunar TTV sources.

Contribution

It introduces the TTV circus tent diagram to visualize modes, develops an approach for sampling orbital periods, and offers a Bayesian framework to differentiate planetary from lunar TTVs.

Findings

Mapped the mode landscape of perturbing planets using simulations

Provided analytical predictions for TTV mode locations and widths

Developed a Bayesian method to distinguish planetary and lunar TTVs

Abstract

There are now thousands of single-planet systems observed to exhibit transit timing variations (TTVs), yet we largely lack any interpretation of the implied masses responsible for these perturbations. Even when assuming these TTVs are driven by perturbing planets, the solution space is notoriously multi-modal with respect to the perturber's orbital period and there exists no standardized procedure to pinpoint these modes, besides from blind brute force numerical efforts. Using $N$-body simulations with TTVFast and focusing on the dominant periodic signal in the TTVs, we chart out the landscape of these modes and provide analytic predictions for their locations and widths, providing the community with a map for the first time: the TTV circus tent diagram. We then introduce an approach for modeling single-planet TTVs in the low-eccentricity regime, by splitting the orbital period space into a number of uniform prior bins over which there aren't these degeneracies. We show how one can define appropriate orbital period priors for the perturbing planet in order to sufficiently sample the complete parameter space. We demonstrate, analytically, how one can explain the numerical simulations using first-order near mean-motion resonance super-periods, the synodic period, and their aliases -- the expected dominant TTV periods in the low-eccentricity regime. Using a Bayesian framework, we then present a method for determining the optimal solution between TTVs induced by a perturbing planet and TTVs induced by a moon.