The Kepler-10 planetary system revisited by HARPS-N: a hot rocky world and a solid Neptune-mass planet
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Kepler-10b was the first rocky planet detected by the Kepler
satellite and confirmed with radial velocity follow-up observations from
Keck-HIRES. The mass of the planet was measured with a precision of
around 30%, which was insufficient to constrain models of its internal
structure and composition in detail. In addition to Kepler-10b, a second
planet transiting the same star with a period of 45 days was
statistically validated, but the radial velocities were only good enough
to set an upper limit of 20 M ⊕ for the mass of
Kepler-10c. To improve the precision on the mass for planet b, the
HARPS-N Collaboration decided to observe Kepler-10 intensively with the
HARPS-N spectrograph on the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo on La Palma. In
total, 148 high-quality radial-velocity measurements were obtained over
two observing seasons. These new data allow us to improve the precision
of the mass determination for Kepler-10b to 15%. With a mass of 3.33 ±
0.49 M ⊕ and an updated radius of R ⊕, Kepler-10b has a density of 5.8 ± 0.8 g cm–3,
very close to the value predicted by models with the same internal
structure and composition as the Earth. We were also able to determine a
mass for the 45-day period planet Kepler-10c, with an even better
precision of 11%. With a mass of 17.2 ± 1.9 M ⊕ and radius of R ⊕, Kepler-10c has a density of 7.1 ± 1.0 g cm–3. Kepler-10c appears to be the first strong evidence of a class of more massive solid planets with longer orbital periods.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 154 |
Journal | The Astrophysical Journal |
Volume | 789 |
Issue number | 2 |
Number of pages | 14 |
ISSN | 0004-637X |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2014 |
ID: 140013880