AAS: Kepler detects rocky super-earth

Kepler 10-b, announced at the Annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society today, has a mass of 4.6 Earth masses and a radius of 1.4 Earth radii. Density of 8.8

Kepler 10b: Exoplanet Catalog

Kepler Mission website - 700 more to go.

Kepler 10b - Mission catalog data

20 hour orbital period around an old, slightly metal poor ( Z ~ -0.15) G dwarf.
500 light years away.



Kepler 10b - artist's conception

Paper is Batalha et al (ApJ in press) - expect it will be on arXiv tonight.
Lightcurve ought to be interesting, will really tell us how deep Kepler is going to go.
11th magnitude host star, quoted at 12 +/- 4 Gyr age - sincerely hope the "+" is spurious based on assumption of symmetric errors - if it really is 16 Gyr then the star is rather more interesting then the planet... ;-)
So really 8-12 Gyr old, and probably, given its position and metallicity, more like 8-9 Gyr old.
Good astroseismology on the star, that will make an interesting paper in its own right.

Aha!


Here is the light curve (click to embiggen).

Yup, they ought to be able to go shallower.
One earth radius might be in reach... interesting.
Nice one.

Assorted animations for your viewing pleasure

Maybe a second planet, 20 Earth masses, or less, candidate label Kepler 10c, in an outer orbit at 45d orbital period and planetary radius of about 10,000 km.



Lava Falls: Kepler 10b - artist's conception

More like this

I come to praise Kepler, not to bury it...
"The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so vast and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment." -Johannes Kepler, and the adopted saying of the Kepler mission
“Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” -Richard Feynman
NASA's Kepler Planet Finding Mission makes its first discovery announcement. Announcement on NASA TV, from www.nasa.gov at 2pm thursday 6th of August, 2009. Now with figures and press release info.

Seems to be quite similar to CoRoT-7b. Would have been better if the press release had at least mentioned that when stating it is the first solid evidence for an extrasolar rocky planet (admittedly there are quite a few problems pinning down the properties of CoRoT-7b)...