Photodynamical analysis of the nearly resonant planetary system WASP-148: Accurate transit-timing variations and mutual orbital inclination

This is an Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.WASP-148 is a recently announced extra-solar system harbouring at least two giant planets. The inner planet transits its host star. The planets travel on eccentric orbits and are near the 4:1 mean-motion resonance, which implies significant mutual gravitational interactions. In particular, this causes transit-timing variations of a few minutes, which were detected based on ground-based photometry. This made WASP-148 one of the few cases where such a phenomenon was detected without space-based photometry. Here, we present a self-consistent model of WASP-148 that takes into account the gravitational interactions between all known bodies in the system. Our analysis simultaneously fits the available radial velocities and transit light curves. In particular, we used the photometry secured by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and made public after the WASP-148 discovery announcement. The TESS data confirm the transit-timing variations, but only in combination with previously measured transit times. The system parameters we derived agree with those previously reported and have a significantly improved precision, including the mass of the non-transiting planet. We found a significant mutual inclination between the orbital planes of the two planets: I = 41.0+6.2°-7.6 based on the modelling of the observations, although we found I = 20.8 ± 4.6° when we imposed a constraint on the model enforcing long-term dynamical stability. When a third planet was added to the model – based on a candidate signal in the radial velocity – the mutual inclination between planets b and c changed significantly allowing solutions closer to coplanar. We conclude that more data are needed to establish the true architecture of the system. If the significant mutual inclination is confirmed, WASP-148 would become one of the only few candidate non-coplanar planetary systems. We discuss possible origins for this misalignment. © J. M. Almenara et al. 2022.This paper includes data collected by the TESS mission. Funding for the TESS mission is provided by the NASA Explorer Program. Resources supporting this work were provided by the NASA High-End Computing (HEC) Program through the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames Research Center for the production of the SPOC data products. This work has made use of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia (https://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia), processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC, https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dpac/consortium). Funding for the DPAC has been provided by national institutions, in particular the institutions participating in the Gaia Multilateral Agreement. Simulations in this paper made use of the REBOUND code which can be downloaded freely at http://github.com/hannorein/ rebound. Part of these simulations have been run on the Lesta cluster kindly provided by the Observatoire de Genève. This research has made use of the NASA Exoplanet Archive, which is operated by the California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under the Exoplanet Exploration Program. A.C. acknowledges support by CFisUC projects (UIDB/04564/2020 and UIDP/04564/2020), GRAVITY (PTDC/FIS-AST/7002/2020), ENGAGE SKA (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-022217), and PHO-BOS (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-029932), funded by COMPETE 2020 and FCT, Portugal. G.M. acknowledges the financial support from the National Science Centre, Poland through grant no. 2016/23/B/ST9/00579. MF acknowledges financial support from grant PID2019-109522GB-C5X/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN). M.F., V.C. and J.S. acknowledge financial support from the State Agency for Research of the Spanish MCIU through the Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa award to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (SEV-2017-0709). J.M.A. and X.B. acknowledge funding from the European Research Council under the ERC Grant Agreement n. 337591-ExTrA.Peer reviewe