Constraints on Planet Occurrence Around Nearby Mid-to-Late M Dwarfs From the Mearth Project

Berta, Zachory K.; Irwin, Jonathan; Charbonneau, David

doi:10.1088/0004-637x/775/2/91

Cited by 74 publications

(54 citation statements)

References 97 publications

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“…Fitting these star parameters to transit curves from Kepler data reveals that a planet transiting around a companion would have a radius of ≈2.8-4.7 R Å . Such a scenario would be consistent with our observations; however, the prospect of the system existing in the first place is highly unlikely given the low occurrence rates ( 0.15  star −1 ) of large planets around cool stars (Berta et al 2013).…”

Section: Validationsupporting

confidence: 88%

Kepler-1649b: An Exo-Venus in the Solar Neighborhood

Angelo

Rowe

Howell

et al. 2017

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The Kepler mission has revealed that Earth-sized planets are common, and dozens have been discovered to orbit in or near their host star's habitable zone. A major focus in astronomy is to determine which of these exoplanets are likely to have Earth-like properties that are amenable to follow-up with both ground-and future space-based surveys, with an ultimate goal of probing their atmospheres to look for signs of life. Venus-like atmospheres will be of particular interest in these surveys. While Earth and Venus evolved to have similar sizes and densities, it remains unclear what factors led to the dramatic divergence of their atmospheres. Studying analogs to both Earth and Venus can thus shed light on the limits of habitability and the potential for life on known exoplanets. Here, we present the discovery and confirmation of Kepler-1649b, an Earth-sized planet orbiting a nearby M5V star that receives incident flux at a level similar to that of Venus. We present our methods for characterizing the star, using a combination of point-spread function photometry, ground-based spectroscopy, and imaging, to confirm the planetary nature of Kepler-1649b. Planets like Kepler-1649b will be prime candidates for atmospheric and habitability studies in the next generation of space missions.

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Section: Validationsupporting

confidence: 88%

Kepler-1649b: An Exo-Venus in the Solar Neighborhood

Angelo

Rowe

Howell

et al. 2017

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“…Our injection tests confirm, however, that these objects would have been found in our sample and we would have expected to find 71% recovered × 189 hosts × 5.4% transit probability = 7.2 planets, assuming an occurrence rate of 1 planet per star. Our findings suggest that the occurrence rate of mini-Neptunes orbiting LMD is likely an order of magnitude smaller at least, making them rare around this population of targets, similar to early-/mid-and late-M stars as shown by observations (Dressing & Charbonneau 2013;Berta et al 2013) and models (Sect. 5) respectively.…”

Section: A Possible Lack Of Close-in Super-earth-size Exoplanets Orbisupporting

confidence: 71%

Probing Trappist-1-Like Systems With K2

Demory

Queloz

Alibert

et al. 2016

ApJL

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The search for small planets orbiting late M dwarfs holds the promise of detecting Earth-size planets for which their atmospheres could be characterised within the next decade. The recent discovery of TRAPPIST-1 entertains hope that these systems are common around hosts located at the bottom of the main sequence. In this Letter, we investigate the ability of the repurposed Kepler mission (K2) to probe planetary systems similar to TRAPPIST-1. We perform a consistent data analysis of 189 spectroscopically confirmed M5.5 to M9 late M dwarfs from campaigns 1-6 to search for planet candidates and inject transit signals with properties matching TRAPPIST-1b and c. We find no transiting planet candidates across our K2 sample. Our injection tests show that K2 is able to recover both TRAPPIST-1 planets for 10% of the sample only, mainly because of the inefficient throughput at red wavelengths resulting in Poisson-limited performance for these targets. Increasing injected planetary radii to match GJ 1214 b's size yields a recovery rate of 70%. The strength of K2 is its ability to probe a large number of cool hosts across the different campaigns, out of which the recovery rate of 10% may turn into bona-fide detections of TRAPPIST-1 like systems within the next two years.

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“…Small telescope surveys such as WASP or HATNet do not detect very faint or red objects and so do not have the ability to cover a significant population of M-dwarfs. Surveys using larger telescopes but single-star monitoring, such as MEarth, do not monitor enough M-dwarfs to probe the frequency of hot Jupiters (Berta et al 2013). Kepler, with a 1 m aperture, was able to monitor M-dwarfs in its field-of-view, but since it only covered 100 sq.…”

Section: Giant Planet Formation Around M-dwarfsmentioning

confidence: 99%

NGTS-1b: a hot Jupiter transiting an M-dwarf

Bayliss

Gillen

Eigmüller

et al. 2017

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

109

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We present the discovery of NGTS-1b, a hot-Jupiter transiting an early M-dwarf host (T eff, * =3916 +71 −63 K) in a P = 2.647 d orbit discovered as part of the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS). The planet has a mass of 0.812 +0.066 −0.075 M J making it the most massive planet ever discovered transiting an M-dwarf. The radius of the planet is 1.33 +0.61 −0.33 R J . Since the transit is grazing, we determine this radius by modelling the data and placing a prior on the density from the population of known gas giant planets. NGTS-1b is the third transiting giant planet found around an M-dwarf, reinforcing the notion that close-in gas giants can form and migrate similar to the known population of hot Jupiters around solar type stars. The host star shows no signs of activity, and the kinematics hint at the star being from the thick disk population. With a deep (2.5%) transit around a K = 11.9 host, NGTS-1b will be a strong candidate to probe giant planet composition around M-dwarfs via JWST transmission spectroscopy.

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Constraints on Planet Occurrence Around Nearby Mid-to-Late M Dwarfs From the Mearth Project

Cited by 74 publications

References 97 publications

Kepler-1649b: An Exo-Venus in the Solar Neighborhood

Kepler-1649b: An Exo-Venus in the Solar Neighborhood

Probing Trappist-1-Like Systems With K2

NGTS-1b: a hot Jupiter transiting an M-dwarf

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