A sub-Mercury-sized exoplanet

Barclay, Thomas; Rowe, Jason F.; Lissauer, Jack J.; Huber, Daniel; Fressin, François; Howell, Steve B.; Bryson, Stephen T.; Chaplin, W. J.; Désert, Jean-Michel; Lopez, Eric; Marcy, Geoffrey W.; Mullally, Fergal; Ragozzine, Darin; Torres, Guillermo; Adams, Elisabeth R.; Agol, Eric; Barrado, D.; Basu, Sarbani; Bedding, Timothy R.; Buchhave, Lars A.; Charbonneau, David; Christiansen, Jessie L.; Christensen‐Dalsgaard, J.; Ciardi, David R.; Cochran, William D.; Dupree, A. K.; Elsworth, Y.; Everett, Mark E.; Fischer, Debra A.; Ford, Eric B.; Fortney, Jonathan J.; Geary, John C.; Haas, Michael R.; Handberg, R.; Hekker, S.; Henze, Christopher E.; Horch, Elliott; Howard, Andrew W.; Hunter, Roger C.; Isaacson, Howard; Jenkins, Jon M.; Karoff, C.; Kawaler, S. D.; Kjeldsen, H.; Klaus, Todd C.; Latham, David W.; Li, Jie; Lillo-Box, J.; Lund, M. N.; Lundkvist, M.; Metcalfe, T. S.; Miglio, A.; Morris, Robert; Quintana, Elisa V.; Stello, Dennis; Smith, Jeffrey C.; Still, M.; Thompson, Susan E.

doi:10.1038/nature11914

Cited by 200 publications

(135 citation statements)

References 56 publications

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“…This planet, which is called Kepler-37b, is significantly smaller than Mercury and is the innermost of the three planets of the system at 0.1 AU. On the other hand, the smallest HZ planets discovered to date by the Kepler mission are Kepler-62e, 62f (Borucki et al 2013) and 69c (Barclay et al 2013b) with 1.61, 1.41, and 1.71 Earth radii, respectively. The potentially habitable planets formed in all our simulations have sizes ranging from 0.38 to 1.6 Earth radii, assuming physical densities of 3 g cm −3 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Diversity of planetary systems in low-mass disks

Ronco

Elía

2014

A&A

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Context. Several studies, observational and theoretical, suggest that planetary systems with only rocky planets are the most common in the Universe. Aims. We study the diversity of planetary systems that might form around Sun-like stars in low-mass disks without gas-giant planets. We focus especially on the formation process of terrestrial planets in the habitable zone (HZ) and analyze their water contents with the goal to determine systems of astrobiological interest. In addition, we study the formation of planets on wide orbits because they can be detected with the microlensing technique. Methods. N-body simulations of high resolution were developed for a wide range of surface density profiles. A bimodal distribution of planetesimals and planetary embryos with different physical and orbital configurations was used to simulate the planetary accretion process. The surface density profile combines a power law for the inside of the disk of the form r −γ , with an exponential decay to the outside. We performed simulations adopting a disk of 0.03 M and values of γ = 0.5, 1 and 1.5. Results. All our simulations form planets in the HZ with different masses and final water contents depending on the three different profiles. For γ = 0.5, our simulations produce three planets in the HZ with masses ranging from 0.03 M ⊕ to 0.1 M ⊕ and water contents between 0.2 and 16 Earth oceans (1 Earth ocean = 2.8 × 10 −4 M ⊕ ). For γ = 1, three planets form in the HZ with masses between 0.18 M ⊕ and 0.52 M ⊕ and water contents from 34 to 167 Earth oceans. Finally, for γ = 1.5, we find four planets in the HZ with masses ranging from 0.66 M ⊕ to 2.21 M ⊕ and water contents between 192 and 2326 Earth oceans. This profile shows distinctive results because it is the only one of those studied here that leads to the formation of water worlds. Conclusions. Since planetary systems with γ = 1 and 1.5 present planets in the HZ with suitable masses to retain a long-lived atmosphere and to maintain plate tectonics, they seem to be the most promising candidates to be potentially habitable. Particularly, these systems form Earths and Super-Earths of at least 3 M ⊕ around the snow line, which can be discovered by the microlensing technique.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Diversity of planetary systems in low-mass disks

Ronco

Elía

2014

A&A

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“…Since its launch in 2009, the Kepler spacecraft has led to the discovery of thousands of transiting exoplanet candidates, including the first multitransiting exoplanet system (Holman et al 2010), the first Earth-sized exoplanets (Fressin et al 2012), the first Mars-sized exoplanet (Muirhead et al 2012), the first Mercury-sized exoplanet (Barclay et al 2013), the first Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of its host star (Quintana et al 2014), and the first circumbinary planets (Doyle et al 2011). Kepler's large exoplanet sample has led to statistical analyses of the frequency of exoplanets around solar mass stars (Howard et al 2012;Youdin 2011;Fressin et al 2013), around cool stars (Swift et al 2013;Morton & Swift 2014), and in their stars' habitable zones (Dressing & Charbonneau 2013;Petigura et al 2013;Foreman-Mackey et al 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Technique for Extracting Highly Precise Photometry for the Two-WheeledKeplerMission

Vanderburg

Johnson

2014

Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific

554

631

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ABSTRACT. The original Kepler mission achieved high photometric precision thanks to ultrastable pointing enabled by use of four reaction wheels. The loss of two of these reaction wheels reduced the telescope's ability to point precisely for extended periods of time, and as a result, the photometric precision has suffered. We present a technique for generating photometric light curves from pixel-level data obtained with the two-wheeled extended Kepler mission, K2. Our photometric technique accounts for the nonuniform pixel response function of the Kepler detectors by correlating flux measurements with the spacecraft's pointing and removing the dependence. When we apply our technique to the ensemble of stars observed during the Kepler Two-Wheel Concept Engineering Test, we find improvements over raw K2 photometry by factors of 2-5, with noise properties qualitatively similar to Kepler targets at the same magnitudes. We find evidence that the improvement in photometric precision depends on each target's position in the Kepler field of view, with worst precision near the edges of the field. Overall, this technique restores the median-attainable photometric precision within a factor of two of the original Kepler photometric precision for targets ranging from 10th to 15th magnitude in the Kepler bandpass, peaking with a median precision within 35% to that of Kepler for stars between 12th and 13th magnitude in the Kepler bandpass.

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“…With photometric precision orders of magnitudes better than on the ground, the Kepler mission (Borucki et al 2010) has contributed most to this growing field, from subEarth-radius worlds (Barclay et al 2013) to long-period gas giants (Wang et al 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Single transit candidates from K2: detection and period estimation

Osborn

Armstrong

Brown

et al. 2016

Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc.

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Photometric surveys such as Kepler have the precision to identify exoplanet and eclipsing binary candidates from only a single transit. K2, with its 75 d campaign duration, is ideally suited to detect significant numbers of single-eclipsing objects. Here we develop a Bayesian transit-fitting tool ('Namaste: An Mcmc Analysis of Single Transit Exoplanets') to extract orbital information from single transit events. We achieve favourable results testing this technique on known Kepler planets, and apply the technique to seven candidates identified from a targeted search of K2 campaigns 1, 2 and 3. We find EPIC203311200 to host an excellent exoplanet candidate with a period, assuming zero eccentricity, of 540 +410 −230 d and a radius of 0.51 ± 0.05R Jup . We also find six further transit candidates for which more follow-up is required to determine a planetary origin. Such a technique could be used in the future with TESS, PLATO and ground-based photometric surveys such as NGTS, potentially allowing the detection of planets in reach of confirmation by Gaia.

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A sub-Mercury-sized exoplanet

Cited by 200 publications

References 56 publications

Diversity of planetary systems in low-mass disks

Diversity of planetary systems in low-mass disks

A Technique for Extracting Highly Precise Photometry for the Two-WheeledKeplerMission

Single transit candidates from K2: detection and period estimation

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