The Kepler spacecraft has been monitoring the light from 150,000 stars in its primary quest to detect transiting exoplanets. Here we report on the detection of an eclipsing stellar hierarchical triple, identified in the Kepler photometry. KOI-126 (A,(B, C)), is composed of a low-mass binary (masses M_B = 0.2413+/-0.0030 M_Sun, M_C = 0.2127+/-0.0026 M_Sun; radii R_B = 0.2543+/-0.0014 R_Sun, R_C = 0.2318+/-0.0013 R_Sun; orbital period P_1 = 1.76713+/-0.00019 days) on an eccentric orbit about a third star (mass M_A = 1.347+/-0.032 M_Sun; radius R_A = 2.0254+/-0.0098 R_Sun; period of orbit around the low-mass binary P_2 = 33.9214+/-0.0013 days; eccentricity of that orbit e_2 = 0.3043+/-0.0024). The low-mass pair probe the poorly sampled fully-convective stellar domain offering a crucial benchmark for theoretical stellar models.
@article{arxiv.1102.0562,
title = {KOI-126: A Triply-Eclipsing Hierarchical Triple with Two Low-Mass Stars},
author = {Joshua A. Carter and Daniel C. Fabrycky and Darin Ragozzine and Matthew J. Holman and Samuel N. Quinn and David W. Latham and Lars A. Buchhave and Jeffrey Van Cleve and William D. Cochran and Miles T. Cote and Michael Endl and Eric B. Ford and Michael R. Haas and Jon M. Jenkins and David G. Koch and Jie Li and Jack J. Lissauer and Phillip J. MacQueen and Christopher K. Middour and Jerome A. Orosz and Jason F. Rowe and Jason H. Steffen and William F. Welsh},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1102.0562},
year = {2011}
}
Comments
To be published in Science on 2/4/2011. Announced at Jan. 2011 AAS meeting and made available on Science Express. Includes Supporting Online Material