KEPLER'S FIRST ROCKY PLANET: KEPLER-10b

By N. Batalha, William J. Borucki, S. Bryson, Lars A. Buchhave, Douglas A. Caldwell, J. Christensen-Dalsgaard, D. Ciardi, E. Dunham, F. Fressin, T. Gautier and 42 more. 2011

464 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 hr with ephemeris T [BJD] =2454964.57375+0.00060−0.00082 + N*0.837495+0.000004−0.000005 days and (2) a 376 ± 9 ppm dimming lasting 6.86 ± 0.07 hr with ephemeris T [BJD] =2454971.6761+0.0020−0.0023 + N*45.29485+0.00065−0.00076 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, M⋆ = 0.895 ± 0.060 M☉, and R⋆ = 1.056 ± 0.021 R☉. 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: MP = 4.56+1.17−1.29 M⊕, RP = 1.416+0.033−0.036 R⊕, and ρP = 8.8+2.1−2.9 g cm−3. Kepler-10b is the smallest transiting exoplanet discovered to date.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Education, Instrumentation

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Citations in the corpus

CHARACTERISTICS OF PLANETARY CANDIDATES OBSERVED BY KEPLER. II. ANALYSIS OF THE FIRST FOUR MONTHS OF DATA (2011, background): “Ten more planets orbiting a total of three stars have subsequently been announced (Holman et al. 2010; Torres et al. 2011; Batalha et al. 2011; Lissauer et al. 2011a).”
POSSIBLE DISINTEGRATING SHORT-PERIOD SUPER-MERCURY ORBITING KIC 12557548 (2012, background): “Rp) hscl ∼ 2c2s v2esc Rp ∼ 2× 10−3 ( 30 µ )( 10M⊕ Mp )( Rp 2R⊕ ) Rp (22) 20 Kepler-9d (Batalha et al. 2011a) may also belong to this class based on its size and orbital distance, but, unfortunately, its mass is not yet known, and therefore we cannot be sure that it is a purely rocky…”
KEPLER MISSION STELLAR AND INSTRUMENT NOISE PROPERTIES (2011, background): “…candidates have been detected and reported in Borucki et al. (2011), with validation of exoplanets first following from transit timing variations discussed by Holman et al. (2010), the smallest rocky planet to date in Batalha et al. (2011), and a sixplanet system unveiled in Lissauer et al. (2011).”
VALIDATION OF KEPLER'S MULTIPLE PLANET CANDIDATES. II. REFINED STATISTICAL FRAMEWORK AND DESCRIPTIONS OF SYSTEMS OF SPECIAL INTEREST (2014, background): “Note that the six criteria listed above exclude some wellknown Kepler planets, including the multiples Kepler-10 (Batalha et al. 2011; Fressin et al. 2011) and Kepler-42 (Muirhead et al. 2012), each of which has only one planet candidate with P > 1.6 days, and Kepler-47 (Orosz et al. 2012), which is”
ARCHITECTURE AND DYNAMICS OF KEPLER'S CANDIDATE MULTIPLE TRANSITING PLANET SYSTEMS (2011, background): “10◦, while the inclinations to the line-of-sight of the confirmed planet Kepler-10b and its recently-validated companion Kepler10c require a mutual inclination & 5◦ (Batalha et al. 2011; Fressin et al. 2011).”
A Detailed Model Grid for Solid Planets from 0.1 through 100 Earth Masses (2013, background): “Such solid exoplanets are Kepler-10b (Batalha et al. 2011), CoRoT-7b (Queloz et al. 2009; Hatzes et al. 2011), Kepler-36b (Carter et al. 2012) as well as - most likely: Kepler-20b,e,f; Kepler-18b, and 55 Cnc e in which the solid material could include high-pressure water ice (see references to Fig.”
HOW THERMAL EVOLUTION AND MASS-LOSS SCULPT POPULATIONS OF SUPER-EARTHS AND SUB-NEPTUNES: APPLICATION TO THE KEPLER-11 SYSTEM AND BEYOND (2012, background): “In order of increasing radius, these are Kepler-10b (Batalha et al. 2011), Kepler-36b (Carter et al. 2012), CoRoT-7b (Léger et al. 2009; Queloz et al. 2009; Hatzes et al. 2011), Kepler-20b (Fressin et al. 2012; Gautier et al. 2012), Kepler-18b (Cochran et al. 2011), 55 Cancri e (Winn et al. 2011;…”
THE FALSE POSITIVE RATE OF KEPLER AND THE OCCURRENCE OF PLANETS (2013, methodology): “…observations, and BLENDER studies have shown that such scenarios are often the most common blend configuration for candidates that have been carefully vetted (see, e.g., Batalha et al. 2011; Cochran et al. 2011; Ballard et al. 2011; Fressin et al. 2012; Gautier et al. 2012; Borucki et al. 2012); 3.”
A STUDY OF THE SHORTEST-PERIOD PLANETS FOUND WITH KEPLER (2014, methodology): “We obtained a secondary eclipse of 7.5± 1.4 ppm for Kepler-10b, a bit smaller than the value found by Fogtmann-Schulz et al. (2014) of 9.9±1.0 ppm, using only the SC data, but slightly larger than the original value reported by Batalha et al. (2010) of 5.8±2.5.”
THE MASS OF KOI-94d AND A RELATION FOR PLANET RADIUS, MASS, AND INCIDENT FLUX (2013, background): “Planets on the low-mass branch could have compositions ranging from mostly hydrogen/helium (e.g. Saturn) to mostly water (Charbonneau et al. 2009, e.g. GJ 1214 b) to mostly rock (Batalha et al. 2011, e.g. Kepler 10b).”
A NEARBY M STAR WITH THREE TRANSITING SUPER-EARTHS DISCOVERED BY K2 (2015, background): “However, most of the planets with measured masses and Rp < 1.6RE have high incident fluxes (e.g., Batalha et al. 2011; Howard et al. 2013; Pepe et al. 2013).”
AUTOMATIC CLASSIFICATION OF KEPLER PLANETARY TRANSIT CANDIDATES (2014, background): “Planets that have very short periods and relatively deep transits are identified as harmonics and removed by TPS (e.g., Kepler-10 b Batalha et al. 2011).”
THE KEPLER FOLLOW-UP OBSERVATION PROGRAM. I. A CATALOG OF COMPANIONS TO KEPLER STARS FROM HIGH-RESOLUTION IMAGING (2016, methodology): “It should be noted that the imaging data are not only important for detecting companion stars, but were also useful in confirming many of the planet candidates (e.g., Batalha et al. 2011).”
KEPLER-18b, c, AND d: A SYSTEM OF THREE PLANETS CONFIRMED BY TRANSIT TIMING VARIATIONS, LIGHT CURVE VALIDATION, WARM-SPITZER PHOTOMETRY, AND RADIAL VELOCITY MEASUREMENTS (2011, methodology): “If both planets have quite different inclinations, as in the case of Kepler-10b and Kepler-10 c (Batalha et al. 2011), this implies an uncertainty in the location of the reference plane and a non-flat system, and the probability of additional planets transiting is enhanced over completely isotropic…”
Ages and fundamental properties of Kepler exoplanet host stars from asteroseismology (2015, unknown): “…Kepler-93 Ballard et al. (2014) 72 11904151 5647± 74 -0.15±0.10 0.918+0.011−0.019 1.066 +0.006 −0.009 1.068 +0.007 −0.012 4.344 +0.003 −0.003 1.063 +0.032 −0.034 10.23 +0.83 −0.67 179.01 +5.46 −5.58 Kepler-10 Batalha et al. (2011) a 85 5866724 6169± 50 0.09±0.08 1.199+0.029−0.030 1.399 +0.012…”