THE LICK–CARNEGIE EXOPLANET SURVEY: A 3.1 M⊕ PLANET IN THE HABITABLE ZONE OF THE NEARBY M3V STAR GLIESE 581

By S. Vogt, R. P. Butler, E. Rivera, N. Haghighipour, G. Henry, M. Williamson. 2010

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We present 11 years of HIRES precision radial velocities (RVs) of the nearby M3V star Gliese 581, combining our data set of 122 precision RVs with an existing published 4.3-year set of 119 HARPS precision RVs. The velocity set now indicates six companions in Keplerian motion around this star. Differential photometry indicates a likely stellar rotation period of ∼94 days and reveals no significant periodic variability at any of the Keplerian periods, supporting planetary orbital motion as the cause of all the RV variations. The combined data set strongly confirms the 5.37-day, 12.9-day, 3.15-day, and 67-day planets previously announced by Bonfils et al., Udry et al., and Mayor et al.. The observations also indicate a fifth planet in the system, GJ 581f, a minimum-mass 7.0 M⊕ planet orbiting in a 0.758 AU orbit of period 433 days, and a sixth planet, GJ 581g, a minimum-mass 3.1 M⊕ planet orbiting at 0.146 AU with a period of 36.6 days. The estimated equilibrium temperature of GJ 581g is 228 K, placing it squarely in the middle of the habitable zone of the star and offering a very compelling case for a potentially habitable planet around a very nearby star. That a system harboring a potentially habitable planet has been found this nearby, and this soon in the relatively early history of precision RV surveys, indicates that η⊕, the fraction of stars with potentially habitable planets, is likely to be substantial. This detection, coupled with statistics of the incompleteness of present-day precision RV surveys for volume-limited samples of stars in the immediate solar neighborhood, suggests that η⊕ could well be on the order of a few tens of percent. If the local stellar neighborhood is a representative sample of the galaxy as a whole, our Milky Way could be teeming with potentially habitable planets.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/64c3b7c90eb42e4fadb2ec7d86112d2a2a073a49

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Citations in the corpus

A dynamically-packed planetary system around GJ 667C with three super-Earths in its habitable zone (2013, background): “For this reason, the first super-Earth mass candidates in thehabitable zones of nearby stars have been detected around M-dwarfs (e.g. GJ 581, Mayor et al. 2009; Vogt et al. 2010)).”
A REVISED ESTIMATE OF THE OCCURRENCE RATE OF TERRESTRIAL PLANETS IN THE HABITABLE ZONES AROUND KEPLER M-DWARFS (2013, background): “…techniques and recent exoplanet surveys have discovered terres- trial planets in the habitable zone (HZ) of their parent star (Udry et al. 2007; Vogt et al. 2010; Pepe et al. 2011a; Borucki et al. 2011; Bonfils et al. 2011; Borucki et al. 2012; Vogt et al. 2012; Tuomi et al. 2012b;…”
GLIESE 581D IS THE FIRST DISCOVERED TERRESTRIAL-MASS EXOPLANET IN THE HABITABLE ZONE (2011, methodology): “GJ581d, in constrast, which was first discovered in 2007 and has a minimum mass between 5.6 and 7.1 MEarth, has now been robustly confirmed by radial velocity (RV) observations (Udry et al. 2007; Mayor et al. 2009; Vogt et al. 2010).”
Defining and cataloging exoplanets: the exoplanet.eu database (2011, background): “This news was published in a refereed paper (Vogt et al. 2010) and as such should normally be in the main table.”
HABITABLE ZONES AROUND MAIN-SEQUENCE STARS: DEPENDENCE ON PLANETARY MASS (2014, background): “Recent observational surveys have discovered several potential habitable zone (HZ) planet candidates (Udry et al. 2007; Vogt et al. 2010; Pepe et al. 2011a; Borucki et al. 2011; Bonfils et al. 2011; Borucki et al. 2012; Vogt et al. 2012; ?”
State of the Field: Extreme Precision Radial Velocities (2016, background): “The primary science goals are planet detection and characterization for a broad range of stellar populations (Vogt et al. 2010a,b).”
HABITABLE ZONES AROUND MAIN-SEQUENCE STARS: NEW ESTIMATES (2013, background): “We have included a ‘?’ for Gl 581 system of planets in the plot, indicating that there is an active ongoing discussion in the literature about the number of planets in this system and their exact orbital parameters (Vogt et al. 2010; Pepe et al. 2011b; Vogt et al. 2012; Baluev 2012).”