A System of Three Super Earths Transiting the Late K-Dwarf GJ 9827 at 30 pc

Creators: Rodriguez, Joseph E.; Vanderburg, Andrew; Eastman, Jason D.; Mann, Andrew W.; Crossfield, Ian J. M.; Ciardi, David R.; Latham, David W.; Quinn, Samuel N.

Abstract

We report the discovery of three small transiting planets orbiting GJ 9827, a bright (K = 7.2) nearby late K-type dwarf star. GJ 9827 hosts a 1.62 ± 0.11 R⊕ super Earth on a 1.2 day period, a 1.269^(+0.087)_(-0.089) R⊕ super Earth on a 3.6 day period, and a 2.07 ± 0.14 R⊕ super Earth on a 6.2 day period. The radii of the planets transiting GJ 9827 span the transition between predominantly rocky and gaseous planets, and GJ 9827 b and c fall in or close to the known gap in the radius distribution of small planets between these populations. At a distance of 30 pc, GJ 9827 is the closest exoplanet host discovered by K2 to date, making these planets well-suited for atmospheric studies with the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope. The GJ 9827 system provides a valuable opportunity to characterize interior structure and atmospheric properties of coeval planets spanning the rocky to gaseous transition.

Additional Information

© 2018 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2017 September 6; revised 2017 December 13; accepted 2017 December 14; published 2018 January 19. We thank Laura Kriedberg and Caroline Morley for their valuable conversations. Work performed by J.E.R. was supported by the Harvard Future Faculty Leaders Postdoctoral fellowship. This work was performed in part under contract with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech)/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) funded by NASA through the Sagan Fellowship Program executed by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute. This paper includes data collected by the Kepler/K2 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. Some of the data presented herein were obtained at the WM Keck Observatory (which is operated as a scientific partnership among Caltech, UC, and NASA). The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of MaunaKea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain. Note added in review: During the referee process of this paper, our team became aware of another paper reporting the discovery of a planetary system orbiting GJ 9827 (Niraula et al. 2017).

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