A 5MJup non-transiting coplanar circumbinary planet around Kepler-1660AB

Abstract

ABSTRACT Over a dozen transiting circumbinary planets have been discovered around eclipsing binaries. Transit detections are biased towards aligned planet and binary orbits, and indeed all of the known planets have mutual inclinations less than 4.5○. One path to discovering circumbinary planets with misaligned orbits is through eclipse timing variations (ETVs) of non-transiting planets. Borkovits et al. (2016) discovered ETVs on the 18.6 d binary Kepler-1660AB, indicative of a third body on an ≈236 d period, with a misaligned orbit and a potentially planetary mass. Getley et al. (2017) agreed with the planetary hypothesis, arguing for a 7.7MJup circumbinary planet on an orbit that is highly misaligned by 120○ with respect to the binary. In this paper, we obtain the first radial velocities of the binary. We combine these with an analysis of not only the ETVs but also the eclipse depth variations. We confirm the existence of a 239.5 d circumbinary planet, but with a lower mass of 4.87MJup and a coplanar orbit. The misaligned orbits proposed by previous authors are definitively ruled out by a lack of eclipse depth variations. Kepler-1660ABb is the first confirmed circumbinary planet found using ETVs around a main sequence binary.