KEPLER's First Rocky Planet: Kepler-10b
Abstract
NASA's Kepler Mission uses transit photometry to determine the frequency of earth-size planets in or near the habitable zone of Sun-like stars. The mission reached a milestone toward meeting that goal: the discovery of its first rocky planet, Kepler-10b. Two distinct sets of transit events were detected: 1) a 152 +/- 4 ppm dimming lasting 1.811 +/- 0.024 hours with ephemeris T[BJD]=2454964.57375+N*0.837495 days and 2) a 376 +/- 9 ppm dimming lasting 6.86 +/- 0.07 hours with ephemeris T[BJD]=2454971.6761+N*45.29485 days. Statistical tests on the photometric and pixel flux time series established the viability of the planet candidates triggering ground-based follow-up observations. Forty precision Doppler measurements were used to confirm that the short-period transit event is due to a planetary companion. The parent star is bright enough for asteroseismic analysis. Photometry was collected at 1-minute cadence for >4 months from which we detected 19 distinct pulsation frequencies. Modeling the frequencies resulted in precise knowledge of the fundamental stellar properties. Kepler-10 is a relatively old (11.9 +/- 4.5 Gyr) but otherwise Sun-like Main Sequence star with Teff=5627 +/- 44 K, Mstar=0.895 +/- 0.060 Msun, and Rstar=1.056 +/- 0.021 Rsun. Physical models simultaneously fit to the transit light curves and the precision Doppler measurements yielded tight constraints on the properties of Kepler-10b that speak to its rocky composition: Mpl=4.56 +/- 1.29 Mearth, Rpl=1.416 +/- 0.036 Rearth, and density=8.8 +/- 2.9 gcc. Kepler-10b is the smallest transiting exoplanet discovered to date.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1102.0605,
title = {KEPLER's First Rocky Planet: Kepler-10b},
author = {Natalie M. Batalha and William J. Borucki and Stephen T. Bryson and Lars A. Buchhave and Douglas A. Caldwell and Jorgen Christensen-Dalsgaard and David Ciardi and Edward W. Dunham and Francois Fressin and Thomas N. Gautier and Ronald L. Gilliland and Michael R. Haas and Steve B. Howell and Jon M. Jenkins and Hans Kjeldsen and David G. Koch and David W. Latham and Jack J. Lissauer and Geoffrey W. Marcy and Jason F. Rowe and Dimitar D. Sasselov and Sara Seager and Jason H. Steffen and Guillermo Torres and Gibor S. Basri and Timothy M. Brown and David Charbonneau and Jessie Christiansen and Bruce Clarke and William D. Cochran and Andrea Dupree and Daniel C. Fabrycky and Debra Fischer and Eric B. Ford and Jonathan Fortney and Forrest R. Girouard and Matthew J. Holman and John Johnson and Howard Isaacson and Todd C. Klaus and Pavel Machalek and Althea V. Moorehead and Robert C. Morehead and Darin Ragozzine and Peter Tenenbaum and Joseph Twicken and Samuel Quinn and Jeffrey VanCleve and Lucianne M. Walkowicz and William F. Welsh and Edna Devore and Alan Gould},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1102.0605},
year = {2011}
}
Comments
Accepted, Astrophysical Journal, November 25, 2010; Eexpected publication date: February 20, 2011