KEPLER 453 b—THE 10th KEPLER TRANSITING CIRCUMBINARY PLANET
- Department of Astronomy, San Diego State University, 5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego, CA 92182-1221 (United States)
- McDonald Observatory, The University of Texas as Austin, Austin, TX 78712-0259 (United States)
- Institute for Astronomy and NASA Astrobiology Institute, University of Hawaii-Manoa, Honolulu, HI 96822 (United States)
- Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 (United States)
- SETI Institute, 189 Bernardo Avenue, Mountain View, CA 94043 (United States)
- Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Chicago, 5640 S. Ellis Ave., Chicago, IL 60637 (United States)
- Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, 776 Daedukdae-ro, Yuseong-gu 305-348, Daejeon (Korea, Republic of)
- Department of Physics and Astronomy, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94132 (United States)
- Department of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 North Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218 (United States)
- School of Physics and Astronomy, Raymond and Beverly Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences, Tel Aviv University, 69978, Tel Aviv (Israel)
- Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Tuebingen, Auf der Morgenstelle 10, D-72076 Tuebingen (Germany)
- NASA Ames Research Center, Moffet Field, CA 94035 (United States)
- Department of Physics and Astronomy, Georgia State University, 25 Park Place NE Suite 600, Atlanta, GA 30303 (United States)
- Florida Institute of Technology, Department of Physics and Space Sciences, 150 W. University Blvd., Melbourne, FL 32901 (United States)
We present the discovery of Kepler-453 b, a 6.2 R{sub ⊕} planet in a low-eccentricity, 240.5 day orbit about an eclipsing binary. The binary itself consists of a 0.94 and 0.195 M{sub ⊙} pair of stars with an orbital period of 27.32 days. The plane of the planet's orbit is rapidly precessing, and its inclination only becomes sufficiently aligned with the primary star in the latter portion of the Kepler data. Thus three transits are present in the second half of the light curve, but none of the three conjunctions that occurred during the first half of the light curve produced observable transits. The precession period is ∼103 years, and during that cycle, transits are visible only ∼8.9% of the time. This has the important implication that for every system like Kepler-453 that we detect, there are ∼11.5 circumbinary systems that exist but are not currently exhibiting transits. The planet's mass is too small to noticeably perturb the binary, and consequently its mass is not measurable with these data; however, our photodynamical model places a 1σ upper limit of 16 M{sub ⊕}. With a period 8.8 times that of the binary, the planet is well outside the dynamical instability zone. It does, however, lie within the habitable zone of the binary, making it the third of 10 Kepler circumbinary planets to do so.
- OSTI ID:
- 22862881
- Journal Information:
- Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 809, Issue 1; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0004-637X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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