Disentangling the parameter space: The role of planet multiplicity in triggering dynamical instabilities on planetary systems around white dwarfs

Abstract

Planets orbiting intermediate and low-mass stars are in jeopardy as their stellar hosts evolve to white dwarfs (WDs) because the dynamics of the planetary system changes due to the increase of the planet:star mass ratio after stellar mass-loss. In order to understand how the planet multiplicity affects the dynamical stability of post-main sequence (MS) systems, we perform thousands of N-body simulations involving planetary multiplicity as the variable and with a controlled physical and orbital parameter space: equal-mass planets; the same orbital spacing between adjacent planet's pairs; and orbits with small eccentricities and inclinations. We evolve the host star from the MS to the WD phase following the system dynamics for 10 Gyr. We find that the fraction of dynamically active simulations on the WD phase for two-planet systems is $10.2^{+1.2}_{-1.0}$-$25.2^{+2.5}_{-2.2}$ $\%$ and increases to $33.6^{+2.3}_{-2.2}$-$74.1^{+3.7}_{-4.6}$ $\%$ for the six-planet systems, where the ranges cover different ranges of initial orbital separations. Our simulations show that the more planets the system has, the more systems become unstable when the star becomes a WD, regardless of the planet masses and range of separations. Additional results evince that simulations with low-mass planets (1, 10 $\mathrm{M_\oplus}$) lose at most two planets, have a large fraction of systems undergoing orbit crossing without planet losses, and are dynamically active for Gyr time-scales on the WD's cooling track. On the other hand, systems with high-mass planets (100, 1000 $\mathrm{M_\oplus}$) lose up to five planets, preferably by ejections, and become unstable in the first few hundred Myr after the formation of the WD.