Paper detail

On the mutually inclined orbits of planets in the CoRoT-7 extrasolar planetary system

We propose a method to be able to decide whether the planets of CoRoT-7 are moving on mutually inclined orbits in the order of i > 10 degrees. The extrasolar system CoRoT-7 is very special with respect to the closeness of the planets to the host star, which results in a fast dynamical development. It would therefore be possible to determine the inclination of the innermost planet CoRoT-7b with respect to the observer after an observation of at least three years from space with the satellite CoRoT with sufficient precision. Different inclinations would cause different duration of the transit times of a planet in front of the star and would therefore give us a better knowledge of the architecture of this system.With the aid of numerical integrations and analytical estimations we checked how inclined orbits of additional planets would change the transit duration of CoRoT-7b. After 3 years of observations when an additional planet would be on a inclined orbit with respect to CoRoT-7b (I_mutual > 10 degrees) an increase of the order of minutes could be observed for the transit duration.