We report the first disclosure of the planetary nature of Kepler-432 b (aka Kepler object of interest KOI-1299.01). We accurately constrained its mass and eccentricity by high-precision radial velocity measurements obtained with the CAFE spectrograph at the CAHA 2.2-m telescope. By simultaneously fitting these new data and Kepler photometry, we found that Kepler-432 b is a dense transiting exoplanet with a mass of Mp = 4.87 +/- 0.48 MJup and radius of Rp = 1.120 +/- 0.036 RJup. The planet revolves every 52.5 d around a K giant star that ascends the red giant branch, and it moves on a highly eccentric orbit with e = 0.535 +/- 0.030. By analysing two NIR high-resolution images, we found that a star is located at 1.1 from Kepler-432, but it is too faint to cause significant effects on the transit depth. Together with Kepler-56 and Kepler-91, Kepler-432 occupies an almost-desert region of parameter space, which is important for constraining the evolutionary processes of planetary systems.
@article{arxiv.1410.2999,
title = {Kepler-432 b: a massive planet in a highly eccentric orbit transiting a red giant},
author = {Simona Ciceri and Jorge Lillo-Box and John Southworth and Luigi Mancini and Thomas Henning and David Barrado},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1410.2999},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
4 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in A&A Letters. Also see the companion paper by Ortiz et al