Exoplanets & Exomoons

A Population of Planetary Systems Characterized by Short-period, Earth-sized Planets

By Keith Cowing
Press Release
astro-ph.EP
October 12, 2016
Filed under
A Population of Planetary Systems Characterized by Short-period, Earth-sized Planets

We analyze data from the Quarter 1-17 Data Release 24 (Q1–Q17 DR24) planet candidate catalog from NASA’s Kepler mission, specifically comparing systems with single transiting planets to systems with multiple transiting planets, and identify a distinct population of exoplanets with a necessarily distinct system architecture.

Such an architecture likely indicates a different branch in their evolutionary past relative to the typical Kepler system. The key feature of these planetary systems is an isolated, Earth-sized planet with a roughly one-day orbital period. We estimate that at least 24 of the 144 systems we examined (>~17%) are members of this population. Accounting for detection efficiency, such planetary systems occur with a frequency similar to the hot Jupiters.

Jason H. Steffen (1), Jeffrey L. Coughlin (2,3) ((1) University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Department of Physics and Astronomy, (2) SETI Institute, (3) NASA Ames Research Center)
(Submitted on 11 Oct 2016)

Comments: Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). This version uses MNRAS style
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:1610.03550 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:1610.03550v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Jason Steffen
[v1] Tue, 11 Oct 2016 22:20:13 GMT (620kb,D)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.03550

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