Detecting and Characterizing Companions with a Calibrated Gaia DR2, DR3, and Hipparcos Catalog (G23H)

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive catalog and modeling framework that combines Gaia and Hipparcos data to detect and characterize stellar companions and exoplanets, confirming known systems and identifying new candidates.

Contribution

We develop a joint likelihood model that integrates multiple astrometric datasets, enabling uniform orbit inference for a large class of companions and improving detection reliability.

Findings

Recovered all known stellar companions at high significance.

Supported 94 out of 120 tested Jovian exoplanetary systems.

Confirmed planetary signals using only Gaia and Hipparcos data.

Abstract

Gaia DR4 epoch astrometry will enable the detection of thousands of exoplanets through astrometric motion. Here, we present a composite catalog and modeling framework that extracts the maximum information from existing Hipparcos and Gaia data releases. We calibrate Gaia DR2 proper motions and DR3-DR2 scaled position differences against the Gaia DR3 reference frame, and combine these with the Hipparcos-Gaia Catalog of Accelerations, the Hipparcos intermediate astrometric data, Gaia astrometric excess noise, and Gaia radial velocity variability constraints. We implement a joint likelihood model for these data in Octofitter that marginalizes over Gaia's unpublished observation epochs. This results in full orbit posteriors that can be computed uniformly for a large class of companions. We compare these posteriors to published orbital solutions for 25 stellar binaries from the Sixth Catalog of Orbits of Visual Binary Stars, recovering all companions at high significance and broadly consistent orbital separations. We then recover independent evidence to support 94 of 120 tested Jovian exoplanetary systems from the NASA Exoplanet Archive (plus 3 known stellar companions, and one previously detected planet we now rule out). We demonstrate that in cases like 14 Her b, the posteriors confirm the planetary nature of a signal using only Gaia and Hipparcos data. We find no false positives among 25 RV-quiet standard stars without significant Hipparcos-Gaia accelerations. Our method can break degeneracies inherent to proper motion anomaly or excess noise modeling alone by resolving orbital curvature within the Gaia baseline. The catalog and updated Octofitter are made publicly available to the community.