An Outer Giant Excites and Constrains the Orbit of pi Mensae d
astro-ph.EP
Submitted: 2026-09-06
Updated: 2026-09-06
Comments: 9 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables. Submitted to The Astronomical Journal
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: The nearby π Mensae system contains the eccentric giant planet b on a 5.7 yr orbit, the 6.27 day transiting sub-Neptune c, and a candidate planet d on a 123 day orbit between them.
Abstract
The nearby π Mensae system contains the eccentric giant planet b on a 5.7 yr orbit, the 6.27 day transiting sub-Neptune c, and a candidate planet d on a 123 day orbit between them. Published estimates place the eccentricity of d between approximately 0.2 and 0.4. We reanalyze 772 published velocities with three-Keplerian fits and explore three-dimensional b-d dynamics with N-body integrations. The high-eccentricity solution persists when the phase or apsidal prior is widened; exact importance reweighting to a population-informed Beta eccentricity prior gives e d=0.378+0.050-0.049. In 20 kyr integrations, 84.5% of configurations near the prograde and retrograde coplanar endpoints survive, compared with 21.3% across 60 at most I bd < 120; stellar collisions dominate the failures. Secular forcing by b moves 53 of 62 one-Myr survivors initialized with e d at most 0.1 into 0.3 at most e d at most 0.5. Representative b+d configurations remain viable for 100 Myr, whereas controls with c and general relativity retain fewer systems. The outer giant can therefore excite the observed eccentricity of d while constraining its viable orbit toward prograde or retrograde near-coplanar configurations.
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