Towards High Precision Mass Measurements of Two Sub-Neptunes in the K2-266 Planetary System Through Transit Timing

Sub-Neptunes have been found to be one of the most common types of exoplanets, yet their physical parameters and properties are poorly determined and in need of further investigation.

In order to improve the mass measurement and parameter determination of two sub-Neptunes, K2-266 d and K2-266 e, we present new transit observations obtained with CHaracterising ExOPlanets Satellite (CHEOPS) and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), increasing the baseline of transit data from a few epochs to 165 epochs for K2-266 d, and to 121 epochs for K2-266 e.

Through a two-stage fitting process, it is found that the masses of K2-266 d and K2-266 e are 6.01±0.43 M_⊕ and 7.70±0.58 M_⊕, respectively. With these updated values and one order of magnitude better precision, we confirm the planets to belong to the population of planets that has been determined to be volatile-rich.

Finally, we present the results of dynamical simulations, showing that the system is stable, the orbits are not chaotic, and that these two planets are close to but not in 4:3 mean motion resonance.

Ing-Guey Jiang, Li-Chin Yeh, Billy Edwards, Ming Yang, Keivan G. Stassun, Napaporn A-thano

Comments: 15 pages, accepted by AJ
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Chaotic Dynamics (nlin.CD); Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability (physics.data-an)
Cite as: arXiv:2503.08905 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2503.08905v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2503.08905
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Submission history
From: Ing-Guey Jiang
[v1] Tue, 11 Mar 2025 21:36:55 UTC (4,379 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08905
Astrobiology