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Published August 10, 2016 | Published + Submitted
Journal Article Open

Five Planets Transiting a Ninth Magnitude Star

Abstract

The Kepler mission has revealed a great diversity of planetary systems and architectures, but most of the planets discovered by Kepler orbit faint stars. Using new data from the K2 mission, we present the discovery of a five-planet system transiting a bright (V = 8.9, K = 7.7) star called HIP 41378. HIP 41378 is a slightly metal-poor late F-type star with moderate rotation (v sin i ≃7 km s^(-1)) and lies at a distance of 116 ± 18 pc from Earth. We find that HIP 41378 hosts two sub-Neptune-sized planets orbiting 3.5% outside a 2:1 period commensurability in 15.6 and 31.7 day orbits. In addition, we detect three planets that each transit once during the 75 days spanned by K2 observations. One planet is Neptune-sized in a likely ~160 day orbit, one is sub-Saturn-sized, likely in a ~130 day orbit, and one is a Jupiter-sized planet in a likely ~1 year orbit. We show that these estimates for the orbital periods can be made more precise by taking into account dynamical stability considerations. We also calculate the distribution of stellar reflex velocities expected for this system, and show that it provides a good target for future radial velocity observations. If a precise orbital period can be determined for the outer Jovian planets through future observations, this system will be an excellent candidate for follow-up transit observations to study its atmosphere and measure its oblateness.

Additional Information

© 2016 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2016 May 2; accepted 2016 June 27; published 2016 August 4. We thank the anonymous referee for helpful comments on the manuscript. A.V. and J.C.B. are supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, grants No. DGE 1144152 and DGE 1256260, respectively. D.W.L. acknowledges partial support from the Kepler mission under NASA Cooperative Agreement NNX13AB58A with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. C.B. acknowledges support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. This research has made use of NASA's Astrophysics Data System and the NASA Exoplanet Archive, which is operated by the California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under the Exoplanet Exploration Program. This work used the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which is supported by National Science Foundation grant number ACI-1053575. This research was done using resources provided by the Open Science Grid, which is supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. The National Geographic Society–Palomar Observatory Sky Atlas (POSS-I) was made by the California Institute of Technology with grants from the National Geographic Society. The Oschin Schmidt Telescope is operated by the California Institute of Technology and Palomar Observatory. This paper includes data collected by the Kepler mission. Funding for the Kepler mission is provided by the NASA Science Mission directorate. Some of the data presented in this paper were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5–26555. Support for MAST for non–HST data is provided by the NASA Office of Space Science via grant NNX13AC07G and by other grants and contracts. Robo-AO KP is a partnership between the California Institute of Technology, University of Hawaii, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, and the National Central University, Taiwan. Robo-AO KP was supported by a grant from Sudha Murty, Narayan Murthy, and Rohan Murty. The Robo-AO instrument was developed with support from the National Science Foundation under grants AST-0906060, AST-0960343, and AST-1207891, the Mt. Cuba Astronomical Foundation, and by a gift from Samuel Oschin. Based in part on observations at Kitt Peak National Observatory, National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO Prop. ID: 15B-3001), which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. Facilities: Kepler/K2 - , FLWO:1.5 m (TRES) - , KPNO:2.1 m (Robo-AO) - .

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August 22, 2023
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