Kepler-36: A Pair of Planets with Neighboring Orbits and Dissimilar Densities
- Creators
- Carter, Joshua A.
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Howard, Andrew W.
Abstract
In the solar system, the planets' compositions vary with orbital distance, with rocky planets in close orbits and lower-density gas giants in wider orbits. The detection of close-in giant planets around other stars was the first clue that this pattern is not universal and that planets' orbits can change substantially after their formation. Here, we report another violation of the orbit-composition pattern: two planets orbiting the same star with orbital distances differing by only 10% and densities differing by a factor of 8. One planet is likely a rocky "super-Earth," whereas the other is more akin to Neptune. These planets are 20 times more closely spaced and have a larger density contrast than any adjacent pair of planets in the solar system.
Additional Information
© 2012 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Received 12 April 2012; accepted 11 June 2012; Published online 21 June 2012. NASA's Science Mission Directorate provided funding for the Kepler Discovery mission. J.A.C. and D.C.F. acknowledge support by NASA through Hubble Fellowship grants HF-51267.01-A and HF-51272.01-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Incorporated, for NASA, under contract NAS 5-26555. E.A. acknowledges NSF Career grant AST-0645416 and thanks the Center for Astrophysics, where this work began. W.J.C., A.M., and Y.E. acknowledge the financial support of the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). Funding for the Stellar Astrophysics Centre (SAC) is provided by the Danish National Research Foundation. The research is supported by the ASTERISK project (ASTERoseismic Investigations with SONG and Kepler) funded by the European Research Council (grant agreement no. 267864). S.H. acknowledges financial support from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Computational time on Kraken at the National Institute of Computational Sciences was provided through NSF TeraGrid allocation TG-AST090107. J.N.W. was supported by the NASA Kepler Participating Scientist program through grant NNX12AC76G. Refer to the supplementary materials for access information to data used in this work.Attached Files
Submitted - 1206.4718.pdf
Supplemental Material - 1223269s1.mov
Supplemental Material - Carter.SM.pdf
Files
Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 78424
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20170621-141140697
- HF-51267.01-A
- NASA Hubble Fellowship
- HF-51272.01-A
- NASA Hubble Fellowship
- NAS 5-26555
- NASA
- AST-0645416
- NSF
- Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)
- Danish National Research Foundation
- 267864 ASTERISK
- European Research Council (ERC)
- Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO)
- TG-AST090107
- NSF
- NNX12AC76G
- NASA
- Created
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2017-06-21Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-15Created from EPrint's last_modified field