The HARPS search for southern extra-solar planets

By J. Delisle, Damien Ségransan, Xavier Dumusque, R. D'iaz, F. Bouchy, C. Lovis, F. Pepe, S. Udry, R. Alonso, W. Benz and 15 more. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 2018

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We report the discovery of four super-Earth planets around HD 215152, with orbital periods of 5.76, 7.28, 10.86, and 25.2 d, and minimum masses of 1.8, 1.7, 2.8, and 2.9 M⊕ respectively. This discovery is based on 373 high-quality radial velocity measurements taken by HARPS over 13 yr. Given the low masses of the planets, the signal-to-noise ratio is not sufficient to constrain the planet eccentricities. However, a preliminary dynamical analysis suggests that eccentricities should be typically lower than about 0.03 for the system to remain stable. With two pairs of planets with a period ratio lower than 1.5, with short orbital periods, low masses, and low eccentricities, HD 215152 is similar to the very compact multi-planet systems found by Kepler, which is very rare in radial-velocity surveys. This discovery proves that these systems can be reached with the radial-velocity technique, but characterizing them requires a huge amount of observations.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e053794da0c3791ae24922b91fcc9306d9cfd0aa

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Citations in the corpus

• Origins of Hot Jupiters (2018, background): “…2010s, radial-velocity surveys amassed large enoughs sample to statistically characterize the properties of small planets (e.g., Howard et al. 2010, Mayor et al. 2011) and the Kepler Mission discovered an abundance of small transiting planets (see Lissauer, Dawson & Tremaine 2014 for a review of…”
• The Evaporation Valley in the Kepler Planets (2017, background): “Early RV studies (e.g. Howard et al. 2010; Mayor et al. 2011) showed that the planet occurrence rate increased towards low-masses: planets in the mass range 3-10 M⊕ being most common, with the occurrence rate falling rapidly towards higher masses.”
• Formation of planetary systems by pebble accretion and migration (2018, background): “The occurrence rate of such exoplanets is high: more than 30% of sun-like stars harbour super-Earth planets within 100-day orbits (Mayor et al. 2011; Petigura et al. 2013; Zhu et al. 2018).”
• Hints for a Turnover at the Snow Line in the Giant Planet Occurrence Rate (2018, methodology): “We computed the giant planet occurrence rates out to 10, 000 days based on the planet detections and simulated survey completeness from the HARPS and CORALIE radial velocity surveys (Mayor et al. 2011).”
• The California-Kepler Survey. III. A Gap in the Radius Distribution of Small Planets (2017, background): “…smaller than Neptune (4 R⊕) are much more common than Jovian-size planets has been well documented in the literature (e.g. Howard et al. (2010); Mayor et al. (2011); Howard et al. (2012); Fressin et al. (2013); Dong & Zhu (2013); Petigura et al. (2013a); Dressing & Charbonneau (2015); Burke…”
• The CARMENES search for exoplanets around M dwarfs (2018, methodology): “The radial velocity (RV) technique has been successfully applied to detect such companions around M dwarfs given the relatively low mass of these stars (Marcy et al. 1998; Rivera et al. 2005; Udry et al. 2007; Bonfils et al. 2013; Anglada-Escudé et al. 2016).”
• The California-Kepler Survey. I. High-resolution Spectroscopy of 1305 Stars Hosting Kepler Transiting Planets (2017, background): “Shortly before the launch of Kepler, radial-velocity (RV) surveys found that the occurrence of close-in (< 0.5 AU) planets around FGK stars rises rapidly with decreasing mass, with Neptune-mass planets outnumbering Jovian mass planets (Howard et al. 2010b; Mayor et al. 2011).”
• Compositional Imprints in Density–Distance–Time: A Rocky Composition for Close-in Low-mass Exoplanets from the Location of the Valley of Evaporation (2017, background): “The latest surveys conducted with different detection methods for example show that the presence of planets is, at least around solar-like stars, the norm (Mayor et al. 2011; Borucki et al. 2011; Cassan et al. 2012).”
• Characterization of the K2-18 multi-planetary system with HARPS: A habitable zone super-Earth and discovery of a second, warm super-Earth on a non-coplanar orbit (2017, unknown): “From April 2015 (BJD = 2 457 117.5) to May 2017 (BJD = 2 457 875.5), we collected 75 spectra of K2-18 (EPIC 201912552) with the high-resolution (R = 115 000) HARPS spectrograph (Mayor et al. 2003; Pepe et al. 2004).”
• The Gemini Planet Imager Exoplanet Survey: Giant Planet and Brown Dwarf Demographics from 10 to 100 au (2019, background): “While Keplerʼs transiting planets greatly outnumber RV-detected planets, the RV method does not suffer as much bias toward longer periods, especially with precision RV surveys operating for multiple decades (e.g., Bonfils et al. 2013; Fischer et al. 2014; Astudillo-Defru et al. 2017).”