English

EPIC201702477b: A Long Period Transiting Brown Dwarf from K2

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2017-03-08 v1

Abstract

We report the discovery of EPIC201702477b, a transiting brown dwarf in a long period (40.73691 +/- 0.00037 day) and eccentric (e=0.2281 +/- 0.0026) orbit. This system was initially reported as a planetary candidate based on two transit events seen in K2 Campaign 1 photometry and later validated as an exoplanet. We confirm the transit and refine the ephemeris with two subsequent ground-based detections of the transit using the LCOGT 1m telescope network. We rule out any transit timing variations above the level of 30s. Using high precision radial velocity measurements from HARPS and SOPHIE we identify the transiting companion as a brown dwarf with a mass, radius, and bulk density of 66.9 +/- 1.7 MJ_J, 0.757 +/- 0.065 RJ_J, and 191+/-51 g.cm3^{-3} respectively. EPIC201702477b is the smallest radius brown dwarf yet discovered, with a mass just below the H-burning limit. It has the highest density of any planet, substellar mass object or main-sequence star discovered so far. We find evidence in the set of known transiting brown dwarfs for two populations of objects - high mass brown dwarfs and low mass brown dwarfs. The higher-mass population have radii in very close agreement to theoretical models, and show a lower-mass limit around 60 MJ_J. This may be the signature of mass-dependent ejection of systems during the formation process.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1606.04047,
  title  = {EPIC201702477b: A Long Period Transiting Brown Dwarf from K2},
  author = {D. Bayliss and S. Hojjatpanah and A. Santerne and D. Dragomir and G. Zhou and A. Shporer and K. D. Colón and J. Almenara and D. J. Armstrong and D. Barrado and S. C. C. Barros and J. Bento and I. Boisse and F. Bouchy and D. J. A. Brown and T. Brown and A. Cameron and W. D. Cochran and O. Demangeon and M. Deleuil and R. F. Díaz and B. Fulton and K. Horne and G. Hébrard and J. Lillo-Box and C. Lovis and D. Mawet and H. Ngo and H. Osborn and E. Palle and E. Petigura and D. Pollacco and N. Santos and R. Sefako and R. Siverd and S. G. Sousa and M. Tsantaki},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.04047},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

13 pages, submitted to ApJ/AJ