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arXiv · 2501.06358

From Stability to Instability: Characterizing the Eccentricities of Multi-planet Systems in the California Kepler Survey as a Means of Studying Stability

Matthew J. Doty·Lauren M. Weiss·Matthias Y. He·Antoine C. Petit
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Abstract

Understanding the stability of exoplanet systems is crucial for constraining planetary formation and evolution theories. We use the machine-learning stability indicator, SPOCK, to characterize the stability of 126 high-multiplicity systems from the California Kepler Survey (CKS). We constrain the range of stable eccentricities for each system, adopting the value associated with a 50% chance of stability as the characteristic eccentricity. We confirm characteristic eccentricities via a small suite of N-body integrations. In studying correlations between characteristic eccentricity and various planet-pair and system-level metrics we find that minimum period ratio correlates most strongly with characteristic eccentricity. These characteristic eccentricities are approximately 20% of the eccentricities necessary for two-body mean-motion resonance overlap, suggesting three-body dynamics are needed to drive future instabilities. Systems in which the eccentricities would need to be high (> 0.15) to drive instability are likely dynamically relaxed and might be the fossils of a previous epoch of giant impacts that increased the typical planet-planet spacing.

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Matthew J. Doty, Lauren M. Weiss, Matthias Y. He, Antoine C. Petit. 2025-01-10. From Stability to Instability: Characterizing the Eccentricities of Multi-planet Systems in the California Kepler Survey as a Means of Studying Stability. https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.06358

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