The HARPS search for southern extra-solar planets - XIII. A planetary system with 3 super-Earths (4.2, 6.9, and 9.2 M)

By M. Mayor, S. Udry, C. Lovis, F. Pepe, D. Queloz, W. Benz, Jean-Loup Bertaux, F. Bouchy, C. Mordasini, Damien Ségransan. 2008

266 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Received ; accepted To be inserted later Abstract. This paper reports on the detection of a planetary system with three Super-Earths orbiting HD 40307. HD 40307 is a K2 V metal-deficient star at a distance of only 13 parsec, part of the HARPS GTO high-precision planet-search programme. The three planets on circular orbits have very low minimum masses of respectively 4.2, 6.9 and 9.2 Earth masses and periods of 4.3, 9.6 and 20.5 days. The planet with the shortest period is the lightest planet detected to-date orbiting a main sequence star. The detection of the correspondingly low amplitudes of the induced radial-velocity variations is completely secured by the 135 very high-quality HARPS observations illustrated by the radial-velocity residuals around the 3-Keplerian solution of only 0.85 ms 1 . Activity and bisector indicators exclude any significant perturbations of stellar intrinsic origin, which supports the planetary interpretation. Contrary to most planet-host stars, HD 40307 has a marked sub-solar metallicity ((Fe/H) = 0.31), further supporting the already raised possibility that the occurrence of very light planets might show a di erent dependence on host star's metallicity compared to the population of gas giant planets. In addition to the 3 planets close to the central star, a small drift of the radial-velocity residuals reveals the presence of another companion in the system the nature of which is still unknown.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/89e8988b3c6b5ac0d0677d2ef5bd203669aeee1e

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Citations in the corpus

ESPRESSO: the Echelle spectrograph for rocky exoplanets and stable spectroscopic observations (2010, background): “In the present high-precision programme of HARPS it is estimated that more than 30% of the stars harbor extra-solar planets with masses below the mass of Neptune [5].”
TEN NEW AND UPDATED MULTIPLANET SYSTEMS AND A SURVEY OF EXOPLANETARY SYSTEMS (2008, background): “See Butler et al. (2006) for details. bReferences indicate which orbital parameters are taken from the literature as follows: Be8: Bean et al. (2008); Bu6: Butler et al. (2006); Cc7: Cochran et al. (2007); Cr5: Correia et al. (2005); Ds8: Desort et al. (2008); Fi2: Fischer et al. (2002b); Fi8: Fisch”
A FRAMEWORK FOR QUANTIFYING THE DEGENERACIES OF EXOPLANET INTERIOR COMPOSITIONS (2009, methodology): “As an example we use GJ 581d, a Mp sin i = 7.09 M⊕ super-Earth with a semimajor axis a = 0.22 AU that is part of a multi-planet system around an L = 0.013 L⊙ M3 dwarf star (Udry et al. 2007; Mayor et al. 2009a).”