Determining the mass of the planetary candidate HD 114762 b using Gaia

Abstract

The first planetary candidate discovered by Latham et al. (1989) with radial velocities around a solar-like star other than the Sun, HD 114762 b, was detected with a minimum mass of 11 Mjup. The small v sin(i)~0 km/s that is otherwise measured by spectral analysis indicated that this companion of a late-F subgiant star better corresponds to a massive brown dwarf (BD) or even a low-mass M-dwarf seen nearly face-on. To our knowledge, the nature of HD 114762 b is still undetermined. The astrometric noise measured for this system in the first data release, DR1, of the Gaia mission allows us to derive new constraints on the astrometric motion of HD 114762 and on the mass of its companion. We use the method GASTON, introduced in a preceding paper, which can simulate Gaia data and determine the distribution of inclinations that are compatible with the astrometric excess noise. With an inclination of 6.2(+1.9)(-1.3) degrees, the mass of the companion is constrained to M_b=108(+31)(-26) Mjup. HD 114762 b thus indeed belongs to the M-dwarf domain, down to brown dwarfs, with M_b>13.5 Mjup at the 3-sigma level, and is not a planet.