Astrophysical Parameters and Habitable Zone of the Exoplanet Hosting Star GJ 581

Creators: von Braun, Kaspar; Boyajian, Tabetha S.; Kane, Stephen R.; van Belle, Gerard T.; Ciardi, David R.; Lόpez-Morales, Mercedes; McAlister, Harold A.; Henry, Todd J.; Jao, Wei-Chun; Riedel, Adric R.; Subasavage, John P.; Schaefer, Gail; ten Brummelaar, Theo A.; Ridgway, Stephen; Sturmann, Laszlo; Sturmann, Judit; Mazingue, Jude; Turner, Nils H.; Farrington, Chris; Goldfinger, P. J.; Boden, Andrew F.

Abstract

GJ 581 is an M dwarf host of a multiplanet system. We use long-baseline interferometric measurements from the CHARA Array, coupled with trigonometric parallax information, to directly determine its physical radius to be 0.299 ± 0.010 R_☉. Literature photometry data are used to perform spectral energy distribution fitting in order to determine GJ 581's effective surface temperature T_(EFF) = 3498 ± 56 K and its luminosity L = 0.01205 ± 0.00024 L_☉. From these measurements, we recompute the location and extent of the system's habitable zone and conclude that two of the planets orbiting GJ 581, planets d and g, spend all or part of their orbit within or just on the edge of the habitable zone.

Additional Information

© 2011 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2010 December 21; accepted 2011 February 1; published 2011 February 16. We express our gratitude to the (semi-)anonymous referee whose comments on GJ 581's surface temperature and on limb-darkening coefficients clearly improved the quality of this manuscript. T.S.B. acknowledges support provided by NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF-51252.01 awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS 5-26555. The CHARA Array is funded by the National Science Foundation through NSF grants AST-0606958 and AST-0908253 and by Georgia State University through the College of Arts and Sciences, as well as the W. M. Keck Foundation. This research made use of the SIMBAD literature database, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France, and of NASA's Astrophysics Data System. This publication makes use of data products from the Two Micron All Sky Survey, which is a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center/California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation. This research made use of the NASA/IPAC/NExScI Star and Exoplanet Database, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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