Determining the true mass of radial-velocity exoplanets with Gaia: 9 planet candidates in the brown-dwarf/stellar regime and 27 confirmed planets

Abstract

Mass is one of the most important parameters for determining the true nature of an astronomical object. Yet, many published exoplanets lack a measurement of their true mass, in particular those detected thanks to radial velocity (RV) variations of their host star. For those, only the minimum mass, or $m\sin i$, is known, owing to the insensitivity of RVs to the inclination of the detected orbit compared to the plane-of-the-sky. The mass that is given in database is generally that of an assumed edge-on system ($\sim$90$^\circ$), but many other inclinations are possible, even extreme values closer to 0$^\circ$ (face-on). In such case, the mass of the published object could be strongly underestimated by up to two orders of magnitude. In the present study, we use GASTON, a tool recently developed in Kiefer et al. (2019) & Kiefer (2019) to take advantage of the voluminous Gaia astrometric database, in order to constrain the inclination and true mass of several hundreds of published exoplanet candidates. We find 9 exoplanet candidates in the stellar or brown dwarf (BD) domain, among which 6 were never characterized. We show that 30 Ari B b, HD 141937 b, HD 148427 b, HD 6718 b, HIP 65891 b, and HD 16760 b have masses larger than 13.5 M$_\text{J}$ at 3-$\sigma$. We also confirm the planetary nature of 27 exoplanets among which HD 10180 c, d and g. Studying the orbital periods, eccentricities and host-star metallicities in the BD domain, we found distributions with respect to true masses consistent with other publications. The distribution of orbital periods shows of a void of BD detections below $\sim$100 days, while eccentricity and metallicity distributions agree with a transition between BDs similar to planets and BDs similar to stars about 40-50 M$_\text{J}$.