AAS: Kepler detects rocky super-earth

Kepler 10-b, announced at the Annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society today, has a mass of 4.6 Earth masses and a radius of 1.4 Earth radii. Density of 8.8

Kepler 10b: Exoplanet Catalog

Kepler Mission website - 700 more to go.

Kepler 10b - Mission catalog data

20 hour orbital period around an old, slightly metal poor ( Z ~ -0.15) G dwarf.
500 light years away.



Kepler 10b - artist's conception

Paper is Batalha et al (ApJ in press) - expect it will be on arXiv tonight.
Lightcurve ought to be interesting, will really tell us how deep Kepler is going to go.
11th magnitude host star, quoted at 12 +/- 4 Gyr age - sincerely hope the "+" is spurious based on assumption of symmetric errors - if it really is 16 Gyr then the star is rather more interesting then the planet... ;-)
So really 8-12 Gyr old, and probably, given its position and metallicity, more like 8-9 Gyr old.
Good astroseismology on the star, that will make an interesting paper in its own right.

Aha!


Here is the light curve (click to embiggen).

Yup, they ought to be able to go shallower.
One earth radius might be in reach... interesting.
Nice one.

Assorted animations for your viewing pleasure

Maybe a second planet, 20 Earth masses, or less, candidate label Kepler 10c, in an outer orbit at 45d orbital period and planetary radius of about 10,000 km.



Lava Falls: Kepler 10b - artist's conception

More like this

Four new objects announced, three transiting planets and something peculiar from CoRoT a "compact brown dwarf" - or is it... Four new planetary objects were announced this week: XO-5b is a normal "hot Jupiter" in a 4 day orbit around a solar like G star, maybe slightly bloated.; CoRoT announced two…
The discovery of a jovian mass planet around a metal poor horizontal branch star in a kinematic stream of stars, possibly originating from a merger with a dwarf galaxy, is an interesting conundrum. With bonus updates and links. HIP 13044 - 10' field generated from SIMBAD using Aladin HIP 13044 is…
Dave Charbonneau: why transits are cool Kicking off afternoon session is Josh Winn on transit uses and abuses. Then Gaspar Bakos on ground based transits. you get masses, and planetary radii. Can go to low masses and close in planets, and working to earth masses in habitable zone - Real Soon Now…
Coronographic imaging with the Advanced Camera for Surveys, on the Hubble Space Telescope, has revealed a jupiter mass planetary companion, with confirmed common proper motion with its parent star, Fomalhaut. This would be the first robust bona fide direct imaging detection of an extrasolar planet…

Seems to be quite similar to CoRoT-7b. Would have been better if the press release had at least mentioned that when stating it is the first solid evidence for an extrasolar rocky planet (admittedly there are quite a few problems pinning down the properties of CoRoT-7b)...