A sub-Mercury-sized exoplanet

By T. Barclay, J. Rowe, Jack J. Lissauer, Daniel Huber, F. Fressin, S. Howell, S. Bryson, W. Chaplin, J. D'esert, E. Lopez and 48 more. 2013

177 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Since the discovery of the first exoplanets, it has been known that other planetary systems can look quite unlike our own. Until fairly recently, we have been able to probe only the upper range of the planet size distribution, and, since last year, to detect planets that are the size of Earth or somewhat smaller. Hitherto, no planets have been found that are smaller than those we see in the Solar System. Here we report a planet significantly smaller than Mercury. This tiny planet is the innermost of three that orbit the Sun-like host star, which we have designated Kepler-37. Owing to its extremely small size, similar to that of the Moon, and highly irradiated surface, the planet, Kepler-37b, is probably rocky with no atmosphere or water, similar to Mercury.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. D. Charbonneau
2. Timothy Morton
3. J. Johnson
4. J. Winn
5. D. Huber
6. Andrew W. Howard
7. G. Marcy
8. E. Gaidos

Citations in the corpus

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• Optimized transit detection algorithm to search for periodic transits of small planets (2019, background): “For reference, the shallowest known transit is 11.9 ppm (Kepler-37 b, Barclay et al. 2013), a discovery that was made possible due to the short orbital period (13.4 d) and the stacking of ∼ 100 transits.”
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