Welcome to the new version of CaltechAUTHORS. Login is currently restricted to library staff. If you notice any issues, please email coda@library.caltech.edu
Published August 2022 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

TOI-712: A System of Adolescent Mini-Neptunes Extending to the Habitable Zone

Abstract

As an all-sky survey, NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission is able to detect the brightest and rarest types of transiting planetary systems, including young planets that enable study of the evolutionary processes that occur within the first billion years. Here we report the discovery of a young, multiplanet system orbiting the bright K4.5V star, TOI-712 (V = 10.838, M⋆ = 0.733^(+0.026)_(−0.025) M_⊙, R⋆ = 0.674 ± 0.016 R⊙, T_(eff) = 4622^(+61)_(−60) K). From the TESS light curve, we measure a rotation period of 12.48 days and derive an age between about 500 Myr and 1.1 Gyr. The photometric observations reveal three transiting mini-Neptunes (R_b = 2.049^(+0.120)_(−0.080) R_⊕, R_c = 2.701^(+0.092)_(−0.082) R_⊕, R_d = 2.474^(+0.090)_(−0.082) R_⊕), with orbital periods of P_b = 9.531 days, P_c = 51.699 days, and P_d = 84.839 days. After modeling the three-planet system, an additional Earth-sized candidate is identified, TOI-712.05 (P = 4.32 days, R_P = 0.81 ± 0.11 R_⊕). We calculate that the habitable zone falls between 0.339 and 0.844 au (82.7 and 325.3 days), placing TOI-712 d near its inner edge. Among planetary systems harboring temperate planets, TOI-712 (T = 9.9) stands out as a relatively young star bright enough to motivate further characterization.

Additional Information

© 2022. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. Received 2021 November 2; revised 2022 June 10; accepted 2022 June 14; published 2022 July 27. We thank Adina Feinstein for helpful discussion regarding stellar flares in TESS data. S.V. and S.N.Q. acknowledge support from the TESS Guest Investigator Program G03268 and NASA grant No. 80NSSC21K1056. M.N.G. acknowledges support from the European Space Agency (ESA) as an ESA Research Fellow. This work makes use of observations from the LCOGT network. Part of the LCOGT telescope time was granted by NOIRLab through the Mid-Scale Innovations Program (MSIP). MSIP is funded by NSF. Some of the observations in the paper made use of the High-Resolution Imaging instrument Zorro obtained under Gemini LLP Proposal No. GN/S-2021A-LP-105. Zorro was funded by the NASA Exoplanet Exploration Program and built at the NASA Ames Research Center by Steve B. Howell, Nic Scott, Elliott P. Horch, and Emmett Quigley. Zorro was mounted on the Gemini North (and/or South) telescope of the international Gemini Observatory, a program of NSF's OIR Lab, which is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation, on behalf of the Gemini partnership: the National Science Foundation (United States), National Research Council (Canada), Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (Chile), Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (Argentina), Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia, Inovaçõese Comunicações (Brazil), and Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (Republic of Korea). This research received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 803193/BEBOP) and from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC; grant No. ST/S00193X/1). This work makes use of observations from the ASTEP telescope. ASTEP benefited from the support of the French and Italian polar agencies IPEV and PNRA in the framework of the Concordia station program. Funding for the TESS mission is provided by NASA's Science Mission directorate. We acknowledge the use of TESS public data from pipelines at the TESS Science Office and at the TESS Science Processing Operations Center. Resources supporting this work were provided by the NASA High-End Computing (HEC) Program through the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames Research Center for the production of the SPOC data products. This research has made use of the Exoplanet Follow-up Observation Program website, which is operated by the California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under the Exoplanet Exploration Program. This paper includes data collected by the TESS mission, which are publicly available from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) at the Space Telescope Science Institute. The specific observations analyzed can be accessed via https://doi.org/10.17909/t9-pa2m-e521. This work has made use of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia (https://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia), processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC, https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dpac/consortium). Funding for the DPAC has been provided by national institutions, in particular the institutions participating in the Gaia Multilateral Agreement. Facilities: TESS - , LCOGT - , ASTEP - , Hazelwood. - Software: AstroImageJ (Collins et al. 2017), astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013), batman (Kreidberg 2015) EXOFASTv2 (Eastman et al. 2019), exoplanet (Foreman-Mackey 2019), Matplotlib (Hunter 2007), Numpy (van der Walt et al. 2011), TAPIR (Jensen 2013).

Attached Files

Published - Vach_2022_AJ_164_71.pdf

Submitted - 2111.02416.pdf

Files

Vach_2022_AJ_164_71.pdf
Files (9.4 MB)
Name Size Download all
md5:733530336b67d0940148613369434aa4
7.0 MB Preview Download
md5:348a69d5017f95e041ce93271a818504
2.4 MB Preview Download

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 23, 2023