Artigo Acesso aberto Revisado por pares

CHARACTERIZING THE COOL KOIs. III. KOI 961: A SMALL STAR WITH LARGE PROPER MOTION AND THREE SMALL PLANETS

2012; IOP Publishing; Volume: 747; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1088/0004-637x/747/2/144

ISSN

1538-4357

Autores

Philip S. Muirhead, John Asher Johnson, Kevin Apps, Joshua A. Carter, Timothy D. Morton, Daniel C. Fabrycky, J. Sebastian Pineda, Michael Bottom, Bárbara Rojas-Ayala, Everett Schlawin, Katherine Hamren, Kevin R. Covey, Justin R. Crepp, Keivan G. Stassun, Joshua Pepper, Leslie Hebb, Evan N. Kirby, Andrew W. Howard, Howard Isaacson, Geoffrey W. Marcy, David Levitan, T. Díaz-Santos, L. Armus, James P. Lloyd,

Tópico(s)

Astro and Planetary Science

Resumo

We present the characterization of the star KOI 961, an M dwarf with transit signals indicative of three short-period exoplanets, originally discovered by the Kepler Mission. We proceed by comparing KOI 961 to Barnard's Star, a nearby, well-characterized mid-M dwarf. By comparing colors, optical and near-infrared spectra, we find remarkable agreement between the two, implying similar effective temperatures and metallicities. Both are metal-poor compared to the Solar neighborhood, have low projected rotational velocity, high absolute radial velocity, large proper motion and no quiescent H-alpha emission--all of which is consistent with being old M dwarfs. We combine empirical measurements of Barnard's Star and expectations from evolutionary isochrones to estimate KOI 961's mass (0.13 +/- 0.05 Msun), radius (0.17 +/- 0.04 Rsun) and luminosity (2.40 x 10^(-3.0 +/- 0.3) Lsun). We calculate KOI 961's distance (38.7 +/- 6.3 pc) and space motions, which, like Barnard's Star, are consistent with a high scale-height population in the Milky Way. We perform an independent multi-transit fit to the public Kepler light curve and significantly revise the transit parameters for the three planets. We calculate the false-positive probability for each planet-candidate, and find a less than 1% chance that any one of the transiting signals is due to a background or hierarchical eclipsing binary, validating the planetary nature of the transits. The best-fitting radii for all three planets are less than 1 Rearth, with KOI 961.03 being Mars-sized (Rp = 0.57 +/- 0.18 Rearth), and they represent some of the smallest exoplanets detected to date.

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