Kepler has a new discovery, coming out in Science tomorrow.
Press conference is currently underway.
Discovery is 2 Saturn size planets in 2:1 resonance in 19 and 38 day orbits.
In addition there is a third signal suggesting 1.5 Earth radii planet in 1.6 day orbital period.
Star is "sun like" [sic]. Paper comes out tonight.
- Physical plant wants to put in my desk now, and my desktop is down and I have to clear out in a minute - - done, that was fast. No desktop till tomorrow tough.
Transit Timing Variation should give the planetary masses soon, and few more orbits should confirm the third planet etc.
Sounds real exciting, especially if they have a ~ 3 Earth mass inner planet.
Configuration sounds right for a couple migration with the inner planet "surfing" on the migration of the middle planet.
Might be Earths/Super-Earths exterior to these 3 - at orbital periods of 100++ days.
I'll dissect this properly when I see the paper tonight, as well as the 5(7) planet announcement from the Swiss earlier this week.
Must go pontificate about black holes and stuff now.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Sounds real exciting, especially if they have a ~ 2 Earth gravity inner planet. Same atmospheric potential, same biology trait range potential.
Kepler FTW!
The really interesting recent discovery that has not made the headlines is the massive planet HAT-P-20b, which has 7.246 Jupiter masses but a radius of only 0.867 times that of Jupiter. That's a LOT of heavy elements in the planet's makeup...
Nice little observational confirmation of your and Avi's work--nice!
An earth composition planet with 1.5 radius should be about 5 earth masses, not 3, due to self-compression.
Yeah, the HAT result is interesting, so is the 5 planet system.
The Science paper quotes 3.5 Earth masses for the possible Kepler-9d inner planet - at 1.6d orbital period! 2200K Teff.
The paper does not give enough details about the star - sounds like it might be a subgiant.
The Saturnine planets have very low densities.
Mandell et al are not cited, in fact no real discussion of formation or history. There is a second long paper out on arxiv, haven't gone into it yet.
Impressive demo of what Kepler can do and what is out there.
Wonder what the other 399 hold back candidates are like.
Where is the science paper? I went looking for it at lunch and only found a CoRoT report on exosunspots...
Paper is out in Science, on the website thursday night.
Subscription only. Hopefully comes out on arXiv tonight.
Here is link to the Science News item on it
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/08/with-two-new-saturns-kepl…
This kind of thing is a bit frustrating really, given they went to the effort of making a press release. I notice that ESO tends to make the research paper available with its press releases (like they did for HD 10180), it's a pity this practice is not more common.
The press conference was timed within hours of a refereed paper appearing online plus a manuscript for a companion paper with even more details. The stellar parameters are in both the supporting online materials for the Science paper and the companion paper on arxiv.
I'd guess that some team members probably wanted to think about the theoretical implications. The Kepler could have held on to some of this data for until 2012, giving team members time to conduct more follow-up observations and to perform detailed theoretical analysis. Instead, the team rushed a discovery paper as soon as they had enough info to confirm the giant planets. Now, the entire community can perform whatever follow-up observations or theoretical investigations they choose. Any team members who wanted to write a theory paper about this system will have to compete with others who aren't devoting most of their time to make the mission a success.
NASA open access data policy is not exactly a surprise, and Kepler team already got a data rights extension, and Kepler team members have $ - ok, so maybe not $$$, but something.
Nobody reads the supplemental... Science paper really should have had a couple of lines on stellar type etc, and the discussion of the formation was most perfunctory - really just rattling off a range of papers on range of conjectured processes.
Brilliant result though, and Science format and length restrictions make for tough choices. I guess if I'd been the referee I'd have forced different compromises on the authors ;-)
3 Earth masses seems a bit unlikely for a planet of 1.5 Earth radii. With Earth-like composition, gravitational compression would imply 5-6 Earth masses depending on the equation of state. But, in such a close orbit, Mercury-like composition is probably more reasonable, and this might give 10 Earth-masses. If it is really 3 Earth masses it must have more volatiles than Earth and would likely have formed far from its present location.