Kavli Affiliate: Sara Seager
| First 5 Authors: Madyson G. Barber, Andrew W. Mann, Andrew Vanderburg, Daniel Krolikowski, Adam Kraus
| Summary:
Astronomers have found more than a dozen planets transiting 10-40 million
year old stars, but even younger transiting planets have remained elusive. A
possible reason for the lack of such discoveries is that newly formed planets
are not yet in a configuration that would be recognized as a transiting planet
or cannot exhibit transits because our view is blocked by a protoplanetary
disk. However, we now know that many outer disks are warped; provided the inner
disk is depleted, transiting planets may thus be visible. Here we report the
observations of the transiting planet IRAS 04125+2902 b orbiting a 3 Myr, 0.7
M$_odot$, pre-main sequence star in the Taurus Molecular Cloud. IRAS
04125+2902 hosts a nearly face-on (i $sim$ 30$^circ$) transitional disk and a
wide binary companion. The planet has a period of 8.83 days, a radius of 10.9
R$_oplus$ (0.97R$_J$), and a 95%-confidence upper limit on its mass of
90M$_oplus$ (0.3M$_J$) from radial velocity measurements, making it a possible
precursor of the super-Earths and sub-Neptunes that are commonly found around
main-sequence stars. The rotational broadening of the star and the orbit of the
wide (4", 635 AU) companion are both consistent with edge-on orientations.
Thus, all components of the system appear to be aligned except the outer disk;
the origin of this misalignment is unclear. Given the rare set of circumstances
required to detect a transiting planet at ages when the disk is still present,
IRAS 04125+2902 b likely provides a unique window into sub-Neptunes immediately
following formation.
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