The Discovery of the Long-Period, Eccentric Planet Kepler-88 d and System Characterization with Radial Velocities and Photodynamical Analysis

Abstract

We present the discovery of Kepler-88 d (Pd = 140314 days, Msinid = 96544\,M = 3.040.14\,MJ, ed = 0.410.03) based on six years of radial velocity (RV) follow-up from the W. M. Keck Observatory HIRES spectrograph. Kepler-88 has two previously identified planets. Kepler-88 b (KOI-142.01) transits in the NASA \ photometry and has very large transit timing variations. Nesvorny2013 perfomed a dynamical analysis of the TTVs to uniquely identify the orbital period and mass of the perturbing planet (Kepler-88 c), which was later was confirmed with RVs from the Observatoire de Haute-Provence (OHP, Barros et al. 2014). To fully explore the architecture of this system, we performed photodynamical modeling on the \ photometry combined with the RVs from Keck and OHP and stellar parameters from spectroscopy and Gaia. Planet d is not detectable in the photometry, and long-baseline RVs are needed to ascertain its presence. A photodynamical model simultaneously optimized to fit the RVs and \ photometry yields the most precise planet masses and orbital properties yet for b and c: Pb = 10.916470.00014\,days, Mb=9.51.2\,M, Pc=22.26490.0007\,days, and Mc=214.15.3\,M. The photodynamical solution also finds that planets b and c have low eccentricites and low mutual inclination, are apsidally anti-aligned, and have conjunctions on the same hemisphere of the star. Continued RV follow-up of systems with small planets will improve our understanding of the link between inner planetary system architectures and giant planets.

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