Abstract
We present a high-precision radial velocity (RV) survey of 719 FGKM stars, which host 164 known exoplanets and 14 newly discovered or revised exoplanets and substellar companions. This ...catalog updated the orbital parameters of known exoplanets and long-period candidates, some of which have decades-longer observational baselines than they did upon initial detection. The newly discovered exoplanets range from warm sub-Neptunes and super-Earths to cold gas giants. We present the catalog sample selection criteria, as well as over 100,000 RV measurements, which come from the Keck-HIRES, APF-Levy, and Lick-Hamilton spectrographs. We introduce the new RV search pipeline
RVSearch
(
https://california-planet-search.github.io/rvsearch/
) that we used to generate our planet catalog, and we make it available to the public as an open-source Python package. This paper is the first study in a planned series that will measure exoplanet occurrence rates and compare exoplanet populations, including studies of giant planet occurrence beyond the water ice line, and eccentricity distributions to explore giant planet formation pathways. We have made public all radial velocities and associated data that we use in this catalog.
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 super Earth on a 1.2 day period, a super Earth ...on a 3.6 day period, and a 2.07 0.14 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.
ABSTRACT We present 197 planet candidates discovered using data from the first year of the NASA K2 mission (Campaigns 0-4), along with the results of an intensive program of photometric analyses, ...stellar spectroscopy, high-resolution imaging, and statistical validation. We distill these candidates into sets of 104 validated planets (57 in multi-planet systems), false positives, and 63 remaining candidates. Our validated systems span a range of properties, with median values of RP = , P = days, = K, and Kp = mag. Stellar spectroscopy provides precise stellar and planetary parameters for most of these systems. We show that K2 has increased by 30% the number of small planets known to orbit moderately bright stars (1-4 R⊕, Kp = 9-13 mag). Of particular interest are planets smaller than 2 R⊕, orbiting stars brighter than Kp = 11.5 mag, 5 receiving Earth-like irradiation levels, and several multi-planet systems-including 4 planets orbiting the M dwarf K2-72 near mean-motion resonances. By quantifying the likelihood that each candidate is a planet we demonstrate that our candidate sample has an overall false positive rate of 15%-30%, with rates substantially lower for small candidates ( ) and larger for candidates with radii and/or with . Extrapolation of the current planetary yield suggests that K2 will discover between 500 and 1000 planets in its planned four-year mission, assuming sufficient follow-up resources are available. Efficient observing and analysis, together with an organized and coherent follow-up strategy, are essential for maximizing the efficacy of planet-validation efforts for K2, TESS, and future large-scale surveys.
ABSTRACT Small, cool planets represent the typical end-products of planetary formation. Studying the architectures of these systems, measuring planet masses and radii, and observing these planets' ...atmospheres during transit directly informs theories of planet assembly, migration, and evolution. Here we report the discovery of three small planets orbiting a bright (Ks = 8.6 mag) M0 dwarf using data collected as part of K2, the new ecliptic survey using the re-purposed Kepler spacecraft. Stellar spectroscopy and K2 photometry indicate that the system hosts three transiting planets with radii 1.5-2.1 , straddling the transition region between rocky and increasingly volatile-dominated compositions. With orbital periods of 10-45 days the planets receive just 1.5-10× the flux incident on Earth, making these some of the coolest small planets known orbiting a nearby star; planet d is located near the inner edge of the system's habitable zone. The bright, low-mass star makes this system an excellent laboratory to determine the planets' masses via Doppler spectroscopy and to constrain their atmospheric compositions via transit spectroscopy. This discovery demonstrates the ability of K2 and future space-based transit searches to find many fascinating objects of interest.
Using our K2 Campaign 5 fully automated planet-detection data set (43 planets), which has corresponding measures of completeness and reliability, we infer an underlying planet population model for ...the FGK dwarf sample (9257 stars). Implementing a broken power law for both the period and radius distributions, we find an overall planet occurrence of planets per star within a period range of 0.5-38 days. Making similar cuts and running a comparable analysis on the Kepler sample (2318 planets; 94,222 stars), we find an overall occurrence of 1.10 0.05 planets per star. Since the Campaign 5 field is nearly 120 angular degrees away from the Kepler field, this occurrence similarity offers evidence that the Kepler sample may provide a good baseline for Galactic inferences. Furthermore, the Kepler stellar sample is metal-rich compared to the K2 Campaign 5 sample, so a finding of occurrence parity may reduce the role of metallicity in planet formation. However, a weak (1.5 ) difference, in agreement with metal-driven formation, is found when assuming the Kepler model power laws for the K2 Campaign 5 sample and optimizing only the planet occurrence factor. This weak trend indicates that further investigation of metallicity-dependent occurrence is warranted once a larger sample of uniformly vetted K2 planet candidates is made available.
ABSTRACT GJ 3470b is a warm Neptune-size planet transiting an M dwarf star. Like the handful of other small exoplanets for which transmission spectroscopy has been obtained, GJ 3470b exhibits a flat ...spectrum in the near- and mid-infrared. Recently, a tentative detection of Rayleigh scattering in its atmosphere has been reported. This signal manifests itself as an observed increase of the planetary radius as a function of decreasing wavelength in the visible. We set out to verify this detection and observed several transits of this planet with the LCOGT network and the Kuiper telescope in four different bands (Sloan g, Sloan i, Harris B, and Harris V). Our analysis reveals a strong Rayleigh scattering slope, thus confirming previous results. This makes GJ 3470b the smallest known exoplanet with a detection of Rayleigh scattering. We find that the most plausible scenario is a hydrogen/helium-dominated atmosphere covered by clouds which obscure absorption features in the infrared and hazes which give rise to scattering in the visible. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of exoplanet atmospheric characterization from the ground, even with meter-class telescopes.
Since 2014, NASA's K2 mission has observed large portions of the ecliptic plane in search of transiting planets and has detected hundreds of planet candidates. With observations planned until at ...least early 2018, K2 will continue to identify more planet candidates. We present here 275 planet candidates observed during Campaigns 0-10 of the K2 mission that are orbiting stars brighter than 13 mag (in Kepler band) and for which we have obtained high-resolution spectra (R = 44,000). These candidates are analyzed using the vespa package in order to calculate their false-positive probabilities (FPP). We find that 149 candidates are validated with an FPP lower than 0.1%, 39 of which were previously only candidates and 56 of which were previously undetected. The processes of data reduction, candidate identification, and statistical validation are described, and the demographics of the candidates and newly validated planets are explored. We show tentative evidence of a gap in the planet radius distribution of our candidate sample. Comparing our sample to the Kepler candidate sample investigated by Fulton et al., we conclude that more planets are required to quantitatively confirm the gap with K2 candidates or validated planets. This work, in addition to increasing the population of validated K2 planets by nearly 50% and providing new targets for follow-up observations, will also serve as a framework for validating candidates from upcoming K2 campaigns and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, expected to launch in 2018.
Abstract
We measured the Rossiter–McLaughlin effect of WASP-107b during a single transit with Keck/HIRES. We found the sky-projected inclination of WASP-107b’s orbit, relative to its host star’s ...rotation axis, to be
degrees. This confirms the misaligned/polar orbit that was previously suggested from spot-crossing events and adds WASP-107b to the growing population of hot Neptunes in polar orbits around cool stars. WASP-107b is also the fourth such planet to have a known distant planetary companion. We examined several dynamical pathways by which this companion could have induced such an obliquity in WASP-107b. We find that nodal precession and disk dispersal-driven tilting can both explain the current orbital geometry while Kozai–Lidov cycles are suppressed by general relativity. While each hypothesis requires a mutual inclination between the two planets, nodal precession requires a much larger angle, which for WASP-107 is on the threshold of detectability with future Gaia astrometric data. As nodal precession has no stellar type dependence, but disk dispersal-driven tilting does, distinguishing between these two models is best done on the population level. Finding and characterizing more extrasolar systems like WASP-107 will additionally help distinguish whether the distribution of hot-Neptune obliquities is a dichotomy of aligned and polar orbits or if we are uniformly sampling obliquities during nodal precession cycles.
ABSTRACT
We report the first detection of CO emission at high spectral resolution in the day-side infrared thermal spectrum of an exoplanet. These emission lines, found in the atmosphere of the ...transiting ultra hot Jupiter (UHJ) WASP-33 b, provide unambiguous evidence of its thermal inversion. Using spectra from the MMT Exoplanet Atmosphere Survey (MEASURE, R ∼ 15 000), covering pre- and post-eclipse phases, we cross-correlate with 1D PHOENIX spectral templates to detect CO at S/N = 7.9 ($v_{\rm {sys}}=0.15^{+0.64}_{-0.65}$ km s−1, $K_{\rm {p}}=229.5^{+1.1}_{-1.0}$ km s−1). Moreover, using cross-correlation-to-log-likelihood mapping, we find that the scaling parameter which controls the spectral line contrast changes with phase. We thus use the general circulation model SPARC/MITgcm post-processed by the 3D gCMCRT radiative transfer code to interpret this variation, finding it consistent with an eastward-shifted hot spot. Pre-eclipse, when the hot spot faces Earth, the thermal profiles are shallower leading to smaller line contrast despite greater overall flux. Post-eclipse, the western part of the day-side faces Earth and has much steeper thermal profiles, leading to larger line contrast despite less overall flux. This demonstrates that within the log-likelihood framework, even relatively moderate resolution spectra can be used to understand the 3D nature of close-in exoplanets, and that resolution can be traded for photon-collecting power when the induced Doppler-shift is sufficiently large. We highlight CO as a good probe of UHJ thermal structure and dynamics that does not suffer from stellar activity, unlike species that are also present in the host star e.g. iron lines.
Abstract
We study the emergent spectral fluxes of transiting hot Jupiters, using secondary eclipses from Spitzer. To achieve a large and uniform sample, we have reanalyzed all secondary eclipses for ...all hot Jupiters observed by Spitzer at 3.6 and/or 4.5
μ
m. Our sample comprises 457 eclipses of 122 planets, including eclipses of 13 planets not previously published. We use these eclipse depths to calculate the spectral fluxes emergent from the exoplanetary atmospheres, and thereby infer the temperatures and spectral properties of hot Jupiters. We find that an abrupt rise in brightness temperature, similar to a phase change, occurs on the dayside atmospheres of the population at an equilibrium temperature between 1714 and 1818 K (99% confidence limits). The amplitude of the rise is 291 ± 49 K, and two viable causes are the onset of magnetic drag that inhibits longitudinal heat redistribution, and/or the rapid dissipation of dayside clouds. We also study hot Jupiter spectral properties with respect to metallicity and temperature inversions. Models exhibiting 4.5
μ
m emission from temperature inversions reproduce our fluxes statistically for the hottest planets, but the transition to emission is gradual, not abrupt. The Spitzer fluxes are sensitive to metallicity for planets cooler than ∼1200 K, and most of the hot Jupiter population falls between model tracks having solar to 30× solar metallicity.
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