THE KEPLER-10 PLANETARY SYSTEM REVISITED BY HARPS-N: A HOT ROCKY WORLD AND A SOLID NEPTUNE-MASS PLANET

By Xavier Dumusque, A. Bonomo, R. Haywood, L. Malavolta, Damien Ségransan, Lars A. Buchhave, A. Cameron, D. Latham, E. Molinari, F. Pepe and 24 more. 2014

140 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Kepler-10b was the first rocky planet detected by the Kepler satellite and confirmed with radial velocity follow-up observations from Keck-HIRES. The mass of the planet was measured with a precision of around 30%, which was insufficient to constrain models of its internal structure and composition in detail. In addition to Kepler-10b, a second planet transiting the same star with a period of 45 days was statistically validated, but the radial velocities were only good enough to set an upper limit of 20 M⊕ for the mass of Kepler-10c. To improve the precision on the mass for planet b, the HARPS-N Collaboration decided to observe Kepler-10 intensively with the HARPS-N spectrograph on the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo on La Palma. In total, 148 high-quality radial-velocity measurements were obtained over two observing seasons. These new data allow us to improve the precision of the mass determination for Kepler-10b to 15%. With a mass of 3.33 ± 0.49 M⊕ and an updated radius of R⊕, Kepler-10b has a density of 5.8 ± 0.8 g cm−3, very close to the value predicted by models with the same internal structure and composition as the Earth. We were also able to determine a mass for the 45-day period planet Kepler-10c, with an even better precision of 11%. With a mass of 17.2 ± 1.9 M⊕ and radius of R⊕, Kepler-10c has a density of 7.1 ± 1.0 g cm−3. Kepler-10c appears to be the first strong evidence of a class of more massive solid planets with longer orbital periods.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f63f2aeed6db604a0030f72c8cb5db85674d20a0

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. J. Johnson
2. D. Charbonneau
3. Timothy Morton
4. Jon Fortney
5. J. Southworth
6. G. Marcy
7. Nuno C. Santos
8. J. Winn

In Instrumentation

1. D. Charbonneau
2. J. Johnson
3. J. Southworth
4. Timothy Morton
5. G. Marcy
6. Nuno C. Santos
7. J. Winn
8. C. Dressing

Citations in the corpus

• AN ANCIENT EXTRASOLAR SYSTEM WITH FIVE SUB-EARTH-SIZE PLANETS (2015, background): “Kepler-444 is slightly older than Kepler-10, the host of two rocky superEarths (Batalha et al. 2011; Dumusque et al. 2014), whose age of 10.4 ± 1.4 Gyr has also been determined from a detailed modeling of the oscillation frequencies (Fogtmann-Schulz et al. 2014).”
• A STELLAR-MASS-DEPENDENT DROP IN PLANET OCCURRENCE RATES (2014, background): “Though follow-up and characterization of some planets is possible (e.g., Howard et al. 2013; Dumusque et al. 2014), the Kepler mission excels in providing statistics on planetary architectures, with a survey-bias that is relatively well understood in terms of false positives (Fressin et al. 2013),…”
• ECCENTRICITY FROM TRANSIT PHOTOMETRY: SMALL PLANETS IN KEPLER MULTI-PLANET SYSTEMS HAVE LOW ECCENTRICITIES (2015, background): “Despite Kepler-10c’s small size, the planet was detected using RV measurements due to its high density (Dumusque et al. 2014), and the RV observations favor a low eccentricity (e ∈ [0, 0.14]).”
• Multiple Disk Gaps and Rings Generated by a Single Super-Earth (2017, background): “These planets generally weigh less than 20M⊕, as determined from transit-timing analyses (e.g., Jontof-Hutter et al. 2014; Wu & Lithwick 2013) and radial velocity measurements (e.g., Weiss & Marcy 2014; Marcy et al. 2014; Dumusque et al. 2014; Dressing et al. 2015).”
• CHARACTERIZING K2 PLANET DISCOVERIES: A SUPER-EARTH TRANSITING THE BRIGHT K DWARF HIP 116454 (2014, background): “…to high precision (Ballard et al. 2014), their masses are generally unknown because the host stars are faint (V > 12) and exposure times needed for radial velocity (RV) measurements are prohibitive for all but the brightest Kepler planet candidates (e.g. Dumusque et al. 2014; Marcy et al. 2014).”
• THE MASS OF Kepler-93b AND THE COMPOSITION OF TERRESTRIAL PLANETS (2014, methodology): “As in Dumusque et al. (2014), we accounted for stellar activity by incorporating a stellar jitter term σsj in our adopted likelihood L: L = N ∏ i=1”
• SOAP 2.0: A TOOL TO ESTIMATE THE PHOTOMETRIC AND RADIAL VELOCITY VARIATIONS INDUCED BY STELLAR SPOTS AND PLAGES (2014, methodology): “The recent confirmation of Kepler-78 with HIRES@KECK and HARPS-N@TNG (Sanchis-Ojeda et al. 2013; Howard et al. 2013; Pepe et al. 2013), and the characterization of the the 17 Earth-mass planet Kepler-10c (Dumusque et al. 2014) show that breakthrough results can be obtained with RV measurements.”
• 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, background): “In this parameter space the physical parameters of K2-18b are most similar to the superEarths HD 97658b (Van Grootel et al. 2014) and Kepler 10c (Dumusque et al. 2014; Rajpaul et al. 2017) despite receiving ∼65 and ∼24 times less insolation than those two planets respectively.”
• THE OCCURRENCE OF POTENTIALLY HABITABLE PLANETS ORBITING M DWARFS ESTIMATED FROM THE FULL KEPLER DATASET AND AN EMPIRICAL MEASUREMENT OF THE DETECTION SENSITIVITY (2015, background): “For instance, the 2.35R⊕ exoplanet Kepler-10c has a measured mass of 17.2± 1.9M⊕ and a bulk density of 7.1 ± 1g cm−3, higher than the densities of most 2− 3R⊕ planets (Dumusque et al. 2014).”
• MASS–RADIUS RELATION FOR ROCKY PLANETS BASED ON PREM (2015, unknown): “Table 1: CMF of Planets Planet M(M⊕) R(R⊕) CMF Earth1 1 1 0.325± 0.001 Venus1 0.815 0.9499 0.31± 0.01 K-10b 3.33± 0.49 (Dumusque et al. 2014) 1.47+0.03 −0.02 (Dumusque et al. 2014) 0.04± 0.2 K-36b 4.45+0.33 −0.27 (Carter et al. 2012) 1.486± 0.035 (Carter et al. 2012) 0.37± 0.14 K-78b 1.86+0.38…”
• MOST 1.6 EARTH-RADIUS PLANETS ARE NOT ROCKY (2014, methodology): “Intensive HARPS-N RV-follow-up measured the planet mass to be Mp = 17.2 ± 1.9 M⊕ (Dumusque et al. 2014).”
• Kepler Planet Masses and Eccentricities from TTV Analysis (2016, background): “…Borucki et al. 2010; Hartman et al. 2011; Gautier et al. 2012; Gilliland et al. 2013; Pepe et al. 2013; Alonso et al. 2014; Barros et al. 2014; Dumusque et al. 2014; Kostov et al. 2014; Marcy et al. 2014; Moutou et al. 2014; Dressing et al. 2015; Esteves et al. 2015; Gettel et al. 2016;…”
• HOW ROCKY ARE THEY? THE COMPOSITION DISTRIBUTION OF KEPLER’S SUB-NEPTUNE PLANET CANDIDATES WITHIN 0.15 AU (2014, background): “Rather than representing an extreme on the spectrum of possible super-Earth compositions, Kepler-10c instead exemplifies what we predict to be a fairly typical if somewhat massive sub-Neptune in terms of the envelope mass fraction it could possess.”