Machine learning-based identification of Gaia astrometric exoplanet orbits

Abstract

The third Gaia data release (DR3) contains $\sim$170\,000 astrometric orbit solutions of two-body systems located within $\sim$500 pc of the Sun. Determining component masses in these systems, in particular of stars hosting exoplanets, usually hinges on incorporating complementary observations in addition to the astrometry, e.g. spectroscopy and radial velocities. Several Gaia DR3 two-body systems with exoplanet, brown-dwarf, stellar, and black-hole components have been confirmed in this way. We developed an alternative machine learning approach that uses only the Gaia DR3 orbital solutions with the aim of identifying the best candidates for exoplanets and brown-dwarf companions. Based on confirmed substellar companions in the literature, we use semi-supervised anomaly detection methods in combination with extreme gradient boosting and random forest classifiers to determine likely low-mass outliers in the population of non-single sources. We employ and study feature importance to investigate the method's plausibility and produced a list of 20 best candidates of which two are exoplanet candidates and another five are either very-massive brown dwarfs or very-low mass stars. Three candidates, including one initial exoplanet candidate, correspond to false-positive solutions where longer-period binary star motion was fitted with a biased shorter-period orbit. We highlight nine candidates with brown-dwarf companions for preferential follow-up. The companion around the Sun-like star G\,15-6 could be confirmed as a genuine brown dwarf using external radial-velocity data. This new approach is a powerful complement to the traditional identification methods for substellar companions among Gaia astrometric orbits. It is particularly relevant in the context of Gaia DR4 and its expected exoplanet discovery yield.