Tuesday, May 8, 2012

1205.1341 (Mariusz Slonina et al.)

Testing a hypothesis of the νOctantis planetary system    [PDF]

Mariusz Slonina, Krzysztof Gozdziewski, Cezary Migaszewski, Anna Rozenkiewicz
We investigate the orbital stability of a putative Jovian planet reported by Ramm et. al in a compact binary \nu Octantis. Our numerical study makes use of a new computational Message Passing Interface (MPI) framework Mechanic which we developed to run massive numerical experiments on CPU clusters. The code is illustrated on a model Hamiltonian introduced by Froeschl\'e et al. We confirm that the \nu Octantis planet could reside in a retrograde orbit, according with a hypothesis of Eberle & Cuntz. It may be present in a zone of stable motions which has a structure of the Arnold web formed due to overlapping of low-order mean motion resonances and their sub-resonances. We also re-analyzed the available radial velocity data in terms of self-consistent Newtonian N-body model. We found stable best-fit solutions that obey the observational constraints. They correspond to retrograde, strictly anti-aligned orbits of the binary and the planet. However, these solutions are confined in very small stable regions of the phase space. The presence of a real planet in the system is still questionable, because its formation would be hindered by strong dynamical perturbations.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.1341

No comments:

Post a Comment