A Gap-sharing Planet Pair Shaping the Crescent in HD 163296: A Disk Sculpted by a Resonant Chain

The Atacama Large Millimeter Array observations of the disk around HD 163296 have resolved a crescent-shape substructure at around 55 au, inside and off-center from a gap in the dust that extends from 38 to 62 au. In this work we propose that both the crescent and the dust rings are caused by a compact pair (period ratio ≃4:3) of sub-Saturn-mass planets inside the gap, with the crescent corresponding to dust trapped at the L ₅ Lagrange point of the outer planet. This interpretation also reproduces well the gap in the gas recently measured from the CO observations, which is shallower than what is expected in a model where the gap is carved by a single planet. Building on previous works arguing for outer planets at ≈86 and ≈137 au, we provide a global model of the disk that best reproduces the data and shows that all four planets may fall into a long resonant chain, with the outer three planets in a 1:2:4 Laplace resonance. We show that this configuration is not only an expected outcome from disk-planet interaction in this system, but it can also help constrain the radial and angular position of the planet candidates using three-body resonances.