Parking planets in circumbinary discs

The Kepler space mission has discovered about a dozen planets orbiting around binary stars systems. Most of these circumbinary planets lie near their instability boundaries, at about three to five binary separations. Past attempts to match these final locations through an inward migration process were only shown to be successful for the Kepler-16 system. Here, we study ten circumbinary systems and attempt to match the final parking locations and orbital parameters of the planets with a disc-driven migration scenario. We performed 2D locally isothermal hydrodynamical simulations of circumbinary discs with embedded planets and followed their migration evolution using different values for the disc viscosity and aspect ratio. We found that for the six systems with intermediate binary eccentricities (0.1 <= e(bin) <= 0.21), the final planetary orbits matched the observations closely for a single set of disc parameters, specifically, a disc viscosity of alpha = 10(-4) and an aspect ratio of H/r similar to 0.04. For these systems the planet masses are large enough to open at least a partial gap in their discs as they approach the binary, forcing the discs to become circularised and allowing for further migration towards the binary - ultimately leading to a good agreement with the observed planetary orbital parameters. For systems with very small or large binary eccentricities, the match was not as good as the very eccentric discs and the large inner cavities in these cases prevented close-in planet migration. In test simulations with higher than observed planet masses, a better agreement was found for those systems. The good agreement for six out of the ten modelled systems, where the relative difference between observed and simulated final planet orbit is <= 10% strongly supports the idea that planet migration in the disc brought the planets to their present locations.

Automated summary

The study shows that for binary systems with intermediate eccentricities, using specific disc parameters can closely match the observations, with planets massive enough to open gaps in the disc, migrate towards the binary and ultimately agree well with the observed orbital parameters. For systems with very small or very large binary eccentricities, the match was not as good as systems with very eccentric discs and large inner cavities hindered close-in planet migration. Test simulations with higher than observed planet masses showed better agreement.