Peekaboo: Secular Resonances from Evolving Stellar Oblateness Impede Transit Detection

TL;DR

This paper investigates how evolving stellar oblateness causes secular resonances that can misalign planets and reduce the likelihood of detecting multi-planet transits, impacting exoplanet survey results.

Contribution

It demonstrates how stellar spin-down-driven resonances influence planetary alignments and transit detectability, highlighting their role in shaping observed exoplanet system architectures.

Findings

Resonances can align outer planets, increasing their transit probability.

Resonances can misalign inner planets, decreasing multi-planet transit detection.

Approximately 20% of systems may experience such sweeping resonances.

Abstract

Secular resonances in exoplanet systems occur when two or more planets have commensurabilities in the precession rates of their orbital elements, causing an exchange of angular momentum between them. The stellar gravitational quadrupole moment, which evolves over time due to stellar spin-down over the first $\sim 100\,$Myr, causes these resonances to sweep through the parameter space (of masses and semimajor-axis ratios), affecting a wider variety of systems than when spin-down is neglected. The angular momentum exchange in these resonances typically aligns the outer planets' orbits together while misaligning the innermost planet from its companions. Here, we explore how resonance-induced (mis-)alignments between planets affect the transit outcome. We use the three-planet Kepler-619 system as a concrete case study that is relatively likely (approximately $1$:$1$ odds) to have undergone a sweeping resonance. Consequently, if the outer planets are initially misaligned, a sweeping-resonance-induced push toward alignment in the outer planets' orbits substantially increases the probability that they are observed transiting together. However, the resulting misalignment of the innermost planet from its outer companions, reduces the overall probability that Kepler-619 is observed as a multi-planet transiting system when considering any pair of planets or all three together. This implies that sweeping resonances (which may occur in $20\%$ of systems) have a deleterious effect on the transiting exoplanet sample, suppressing the detection of multi-planet transiting systems in favor of apparent single-planet systems.