An Aligned Orbit for the Young Planet V1298 Tau b

Year: 2022

DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/ac6271

The alignment of planetary orbits with respect to the stellar rotation preserves information on their dynamical histories. Measuring this angle for young planets helps illuminate the mechanisms that create misaligned orbits for older planets, as different processes could operate over timescales ranging from a few megayears to a gigayear. We present spectroscopic transit observations of the young exoplanet V1298 Tau b; we update the age of V1298 Tau to be 28 ± 4 Myr based on Gaia EDR3 measurements. We observed a partial transit with Keck/HIRES and LBT/PEPSI, and detected the radial velocity anomaly due to the Rossiter–McLaughlin effect. V1298 Tau b has a prograde, well-aligned orbit, with

λ
=

4

−
10

+
7

deg. By combining the spectroscopically measured

v
sin

i

⋆

and the photometrically measured rotation period of the host star we also find that the orbit is aligned in 3D,

ψ
=

8

−
7

+
4

deg. Finally, we combine our obliquity constraints with a previous measurement for the interior planet V1298 Tau c to constrain the mutual inclination between the two planets to be i
mut = 0° ± 19°. This measurements adds to the growing number of well-aligned planets at young ages, hinting that misalignments may be generated over timescales of longer than tens of megayears. The number of measurements, however, is still small, and this population may not be representative of the older planets that have been observed to date. We also present the derivation of the relationship between i
mut, λ, and i for the two planets.