Transiting exoplanets from the CoRoT space mission . VI. CoRoT-Exo-3b: the first secure inhabitant of the brown-dwarf desert

By M. Deleuil, H. Deeg, R. Alonso, F. Bouchy, D. Rouan, M. Auvergne, A. Baglin, Suzanne Aigrain, J. Almenara, M. Barbieri and 32 more. 2008

176 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Context. The CoRoT  space mission routinely provides high-precision photometric measurements of thousands of stars that have been continuously observed for months. Aims. The discovery and characterization of the first very massive transiting planetary companion with a short orbital period is reported. Methods. A series of 34 transits was detected in the CoRoT  light curve of an F3V star, observed from May to October 2007 for 152 days. The radius was accurately determined and the mass derived for this new transiting, thanks to the combined analysis of the light curve and complementary ground-based observations: high-precision radial-velocity measurements, on-off photometry, and high signal-to-noise spectroscopic observations. Results. CoRoT-Exo-3b  has a radius of 1.01 ± 0.07  R Jup  and transits around its F3-type primary every 4.26 days in a synchronous orbit. Its mass of 21.66 ± 1.0  M Jup , density of 26.4 ± 5.6 g cm -3 , and surface gravity of log g = 4.72 clearly distinguish it from the regular close-in planet population, making it the most intriguing transiting substellar object discovered so far. Conclusions. With the current data, the nature of CoRoT-Exo-3b is ambiguous, as it could either be a low-mass brown-dwarf or a member of a new class of “superplanets”. Its discovery may help constrain the evolution of close-in planets and brown-dwarfs better. Finally, CoRoT-Exo-3b confirms the trend that massive transiting giant planets ( M ≥ 4 M Jup ) are found preferentially around more massive stars than the Sun.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/acbf31451c4b75f92970225e15a37959701eb7e6

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. J. Southworth
2. J. Winn
3. D. Charbonneau
4. Jon Fortney
5. M. Perryman
6. G. Marcy
7. Debra A. Fischer
8. S. Udry

In Instrumentation

1. J. Southworth
2. J. Winn
3. D. Charbonneau
4. G. Marcy
5. Nuno C. Santos
6. S. Udry
7. Jon Fortney
8. Debra A. Fischer

Citations in the corpus

• THE DEUTERIUM-BURNING MASS LIMIT FOR BROWN DWARFS AND GIANT PLANETS (2010, background): “…have been strained by the recent discoveries of objects such as CoRoT-3b, a ∼22-Jupiter-mass (MJ) object in a close (0.057-AU) orbit around its star (Deleuil et al. 2008) and the directly imaged objects of masses∼5-15MJ at tens of AU from HR 8799 and Fomalhaut (Marois et al. 2008; Kalas et al.…”
• Homogeneous studies of transiting extrasolar planets – IV. Thirty systems with space-based light curves (2011, methodology): “CoRoT-3 was announced by Deleuil et al. (2008) and was the first brown-dwarf-mass object with a precisely measured mass andradius.”
• Stellar limb-darkening coefficients for CoRot and Kepler (2009, result): “We compared the calculated LDCs with results from six of the first seven CoRot exoplanets, four of which have LDCs determined from the transit light curve fit: CoRot-1 (Barge et al. 2008), CoRot-2 (Alonso et al. 2008), CoRot3 (Deleuil et al. 2008), and CoRot-4 (Aigrain et al. 2008).”
• AB INITIO EQUATIONS OF STATE FOR HYDROGEN (H-REOS.3) AND HELIUM (He-REOS.3) AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR THE INTERIOR OF BROWN DWARFS (2014, unknown): “16, from which we selected the GPs KOI-889b (Hébrard et al. 2013) and WASP-18b (Maxted et al. 2013) and the following BDs: Corot-3b (Deleuil et al. 2008), Corot-15b (Bouchy et al. 2011b), WASP-30b (Anderson et al. 2011), KOI205b (Dı́az et al. 2013), Kepler-39b (Bouchy et al. 2011a), and LHS-6343c (”
• PROBABILISTIC FORECASTING OF THE MASSES AND RADII OF OTHER WORLDS (2016, background): “Over the last two decades, astronomers have discovered thousands of extrasolar worlds (see exoplanets.org; Han et al. 2014), filling in the parameter space from moon-sized planets (e.g., Barclay et al. 2013) to brown dwarfs many times more massive than Jupiter (e.g., Deleuil et al. 2008).”
• TWO WIDE PLANETARY-MASS COMPANIONS TO SOLAR-TYPE STARS IN UPPER SCORPIUS (2010, background): “…in the same range as radial velocity or transiting planets with <5AU separations, which have a continuous mass distribution up to ∼20MJ, then a gap in mass until arguably star-like objects are found at >60MJ (Grether & Lineweaver 2006; Deleuil et al. 2008; Bouchy et al. 2010; Anderson et al. 2010).”
• Dearth of short-period Neptunian exoplanets - a desert in period-mass and period-radius planes (2016, background): “It would be of interest to determine whether the boundaries of the Neptunian desert depend on the stellar temperature and metallicity, as seems to be the case for the brown-dwarf desert (Deleuil et al. 2008).”
• DISCOVERY OF A TRANSITING PLANET AND EIGHT ECLIPSING BINARIES IN HATNet FIELD G205 (2009, background): “However, with the discovery of more massive planets, such as HAT-P-2b (Bakos et al. 2007a), XO-3b (Johns-Krull et al. 2008), and Corot-Exo-3b (Deleuil et al. 2008), the period–mass relation has become less clearcut.”
• The Rossiter-McLaughlin effect of CoRoT-3b and HD 189733b (2009, background): “HD 189733 is a most interesting target due to its brightness and the possibility of observing it from both hemispheres fairly easily, while CoRoT-3b, orbiting a very fast rotating star and being itself in the middle of the Brown Dwarf desert (Deleuil et al. 2008) (D08), is a unique object to study.”
• Search for brown-dwarf companions of stars (2010, methodology): “E P] 2 9 Se p 20 10 systems (e.g. Deleuil et al. 2008, Anderson et al., in preparation, Bouchy et al., in preparation).”
• Transiting exoplanets from the CoRoT space mission VIII. CoRoT-7b: the first Super-Earth with measured radius (2009, unknown): “Mass, radius, and effective temperature To determine the atmospheric parameters of the star, we used the same approaches as for the otherCoRoT host stars (see Deleuil et al. 2008, e.g.), with different groups carrying independent analyses using different methods.”
• IMPROVED SPECTROSCOPIC PARAMETERS FOR TRANSITING PLANET HOSTS (2012, background): “…there is no evidence of such anomalies from detailed abundance studies by ourselves or others (e.g., McCullough et al. 2006; Sozzetti et al. 2006; Deleuil et al. 2008; Torres et al. 2008; Anderson et al. 2010a), nor are any of the stars particularly metal-poor so that we would expect [α/Fe] to…”
• OBLIQUITIES OF HOT JUPITER HOST STARS: EVIDENCE FOR TIDAL INTERACTIONS AND PRIMORDIAL MISALIGNMENTS (2012, unknown): “— (1) Gillon et al. (2010); (2) Triaud et al. (2009); (3) Deleuil et al. (2008); (4) Hébrard et al. (2011b); (5) Johnson et al. (2008); (6) Winn et al. (2011a); (7) Moutou et al. (2011); (8) Winn et al. (2010c); (9) Winn et al. (2010b) (10) Johnson et al. (2011); (11) Narita et al. (2009b); (12)…”
• FUNDAMENTAL PARAMETERS AND SPECTRAL ENERGY DISTRIBUTIONS OF YOUNG AND FIELD AGE OBJECTS WITH MASSES SPANNING THE STELLAR TO PLANETARY REGIME (2015, background): “The directly measured radii of the 0.4–12.7 Gyr brown dwarfs OGLE-TR-122b (Pont et al. 2005), CoRoT-3b (Deleuil et al. 2008), CoRoT-15b (Bouchy et al. 2010), WASP-30b (Anderson et al. 2010), LHS 6343 C (Johnson et al. 2011), KELT-1b (Siverd et al. 2012), KOI-205b (Díaz et al. 2013), KOI-415b…”