→ Widely unknown Exoplanet Astronomer

There has recently been a lot of talk in the media about the discovery of new Super-Earths (ESO, BBC). The Kepler team has also announced that they will be revealing new discoveries tomorrow. In this post I thought I might write about the Super-Earths Kepler has found so far.

Super-Earths are a class of exoplanets with masses between 1-10 times the mass of Earth. The study of Super-Earths are of great interest as there is no planet in this mass and size regime in our solar system.

Kepler-10 b – The smallest Super-Earth

Kepler-10 b is the smallest Super-Earth discovered to date with a Radius of 1.4 Earth radii. It is also the first rocky planet found by the Kepler spacecraft and also the first terrestrial planet found outside our solar system. Here is a video by NASA about this exoplanet:

Kepler-11 – A planetary system with multiple Super-Earths

The Kepler-11 planetary system has 4 Super-Earths (so far) and is the most compact exoplanet system discovered to date. Kepler-11 is a remarkable planetary system whose architecture and dynamics provide clues to its formation. More information on this in the discovery paper.

Kepler-9 d – Thought to be a Super-Earth

Kepler-9 d is thought to be a Super-Earth. I say “thought to be” as current spectroscopic observations are still insufficient to establish its mass. The discoverers of the planet led by Torres, G say:

Based on several realistic estimates of this frequency, we conclude with very high confidence that this small signal is due to a super-Earth-size planet (Kepler-9 d) in a multiple system, rather than a false positive.

Secret companion found via Transit Timing Variations

Worth mentioning here is last weeks news of the discovery of Kepler-19 b. What made this discovery so special wasn’t so much the exoplanet Kepler-19 b but that a companion of this planet, Kepler-19 c was found using transit timing variations (mentioned in my post here). In short, transit timing variations deals with inferring the presence of one or more planets due to timing variations in the expected transit time. For this to be possible, very high quality data is needed, something Kepler provides.  Although Kepler-19 is not a Super-Earth it is likely that the transit timing variations technique will discover more Super-Earths in the future.

Credit: NASA

The Exoplanet group lead by Dr. David Sing at the University of Exeter has been awarded nearly 200 hours of telescope time at the Hubble Space Telescope. As a PhD student of his this means a busy time ahead of me.  The awarded telescope time will be used to study the atmospheres of Exoplanets.

Dr. David Sing:

“This is one of the biggest exoplanet research programmes ever using the Hubble Space Telescope. It is a major coup for the University of Exeter to have secured such a significant amount of time on the world’s best telescope”.

“Astronomers have now detected hundreds of exoplanets and we now know that some of these planets have extreme environments, unlike anything in our own solar system. Everything we have discovered so far about these planets has been puzzling so I am expecting the unexpected.”

Further reading: BBC News, University of Exeter and University of Arizona

New Kepler data from quater three is scheduled to be released on 23rd of September. This will be the data collected from September to December 2009.

The data will be available at:

http://archive.stsci.edu/kepler

Credit: STSCI