DISCOVERY AND VALIDATION OF Kepler-452b: A 1.6 R⨁ SUPER EARTH EXOPLANET IN THE HABITABLE ZONE OF A G2 STAR

By Jon M. Jenkins, Joseph D. Twicken, N. Batalha, Douglas A. Caldwell, W. Cochran, M. Endl, D. Latham, G. Esquerdo, S. Seader, A. Bieryla and 19 more. 2015

144 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report on the discovery and validation of Kepler-452b, a transiting planet identified by a search through the 4 years of data collected by NASA’s Kepler Mission. This possibly rocky 1.63 − 0.20 + 0.23 ?> R ⨁ ?> planet orbits its G2 host star every 384.843 − 0.012 + 0.007 ?> days, the longest orbital period for a small ( R P < 2 ?> R ⨁ ?> ) transiting exoplanet to date. The likelihood that this planet has a rocky composition lies between 49% and 62%. The star has an effective temperature of 5757 ± 85 K and a log g ?> of 4.32 ± 0.09. At a mean orbital separation of 1.046 − 0.015 + 0.019 ?> AU, this small planet is well within the optimistic habitable zone of its star (recent Venus/early Mars), experiencing only 10% more flux than Earth receives from the Sun today, and slightly outside the conservative habitable zone (runaway greenhouse/maximum greenhouse). The star is slightly larger and older than the Sun, with a present radius of 1.11 − 0.09 + 0.15 ?> R ☉ ?> and an estimated age of ∼6 Gyr. Thus, Kepler-452b has likely always been in the habitable zone and should remain there for another ∼3 Gyr.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b25b827e069f022f0dde00d382493a31c1f4c2da

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Citations in the corpus

• PROBABILISTIC MASS–RADIUS RELATIONSHIP FOR SUB-NEPTUNE-SIZED PLANETS (2015, methodology): “Jenkins et al. (2015) provides an example of an individual planet’s posterior predictive mass distribution that has been calculated with this probabilistic M-R relation; because its computation requires the numerical posterior samples that we have produced, the resulting mass distribution is also…”
• The California-Kepler Survey. I. High-resolution Spectroscopy of 1305 Stars Hosting Kepler Transiting Planets (2017, background): “Some of the individual habitable-zone planets have been studied extensively and validated (Borucki et al. 2013; Torres et al. 2015; Jenkins et al. 2015).”
• SOPHIE velocimetry of Kepler transit candidates XVII. The physical properties of giant exoplanets within 400 days of period (2015, background): “At a time when small planets in the habitable zone are found (e.g. Jenkins et al. 2015), the characterisation of EGPs is still of high importance to answer the aforementioned questions.”
• Revised Stellar Properties of Kepler Targets for the Q1-17 (DR25) Transit Detection Run (2016, methodology): “To test the validity of the method, Figure 5 compares the replicated posteriors for Kepler-452 (black solid line) to the discrete posterior (red dashed line) and posteriors derived from a full MCMC analysis by Jenkins et al. (2015).”
• THE KEPLER CATALOG OF STELLAR FLARES (2016, background): “While the exoplanet yield has been wildly successful (e.g. Jenkins et al. 2015), Kepler has been equally fruitful in studying the astrophysics of field stars.”
• PROBABILISTIC FORECASTING OF THE MASSES AND RADII OF OTHER WORLDS (2016, background): “Therefore, in contrast to the discovery paper of Jenkins et al. (2015), we predict that Kepler-452b is unlikely to be a rocky planet.”