CaltechAUTHORS
Published August 10, 2015 | Version Published
Journal Article Open

Kepler 453 b—The 10th Kepler Transiting Circumbinary Planet

Creators

  • 1. ROR icon San Diego State University
  • 2. ROR icon The University of Texas at Austin
  • 3. ROR icon University of Hawaii at Manoa
  • 4. ROR icon Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
  • 5. ROR icon University of Copenhagen
  • 6. ROR icon Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
  • 7. ROR icon Principia College
  • 8. ROR icon University of Chicago
  • 9. ROR icon Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute
  • 10. ROR icon Armagh Observatory
  • 11. ROR icon San Francisco State University
  • 12. ROR icon Johns Hopkins University
  • 13. ROR icon Tel Aviv University
  • 14. ROR icon University of Tübingen
  • 15. ROR icon Ames Research Center
  • 16. ROR icon Georgia State University
  • 17. ROR icon Florida Institute of Technology
  • 18. ROR icon Jet Propulsion Lab
  • 19. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 20. ROR icon Northwestern University

Abstract

We present the discovery of Kepler-453 b, a 6.2 R⊕ planet in a low-eccentricity, 240.5 day orbit about an eclipsing binary. The binary itself consists of a 0.94 and 0.195 M⊙ pair of stars with an orbital period of 27.32 days. The plane of the planet's orbit is rapidly precessing, and its inclination only becomes sufficiently aligned with the primary star in the latter portion of the Kepler data. Thus three transits are present in the second half of the light curve, but none of the three conjunctions that occurred during the first half of the light curve produced observable transits. The precession period is ~103 years, and during that cycle, transits are visible only ~8.9% of the time. This has the important implication that for every system like Kepler-453 that we detect, there are ~11.5 circumbinary systems that exist but are not currently exhibiting transits. The planet's mass is too small to noticeably perturb the binary, and consequently its mass is not measurable with these data; however, our photodynamical model places a 1σ upper limit of 16 M⊕. With a period 8.8 times that of the binary, the planet is well outside the dynamical instability zone. It does, however, lie within the habitable zone of the binary, making it the third of 10 Kepler circumbinary planets to do so.

Additional Information

© 2015 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2014 August 30; accepted 2015 July 1; published 2015 August 5. We thank the ApJ Editors for their patience and the anonymous referee for suggestions that helped improve this paper. We thank Amy McQuillan of Tel Aviv University for assistance with the measurement of the ACF, and Justice Bruursema for assisting with the WIYN observations. W.F.W.thanks the Institute for Astronomy and the NASA Astrobiology Institute at the University of Hawaii-Manoa for their support and kind hospitality during his sabbatical visit when part of this project was carried out. W.F.W. and J.A.O. gratefully acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation via grant AST-1109928, and from NASA's Kepler Participating Scientist Program (NNX12AD23G) and Origins of Solar Systems Program (NNX13AI76G). T.C.H. gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Korea Research Council for Fundamental Science and Technology (KRCF) through the Young Research Scientist Fellowship Program and financial support from KASI (Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute) grant number 2013-9-400-0/2014-1-400-06. Numerical computations were partly carried out using the SFI/HEA Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) and the KMTNet computing cluster at the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute. Astronomical research at the Armagh Observatory is funded by the Northern Ireland Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure (DCAL). N.H. acknowledges support from the NASA ADAP grant NNX13AF20G, NASA Origins grant NNX12AQ62G, Astrobiology Institute under Cooperative Agreement NNA09DA77 at the Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii, and HST grant HST-GO-12548.06-A. Support for program HST-GO-12548.06-A was provided by NASA through a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Incorporated, under NASA contract NAS5-26555. T.M. gratefully acknowledges support of from the European Research Council under the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (ERC Grant Agreement No. 291352). B.Q. gratefully acknowledges the support of the NASA Postdoctoral Program. J.H.S. acknowledges the support from NASA's Kepler Participating Scientist Program (NNX12AD23G). G.T. acknowledges partial support from NSF grant AST-1007992. The authors acknowledge the outstanding work of David Ciardi (NExScI/Caltech) in organizing and maintaining the Kepler Community Follow-up Observing Program (CFOP) website.26 We also thank Phil Lucas for organizing the UKIRT J-band observations of the Kepler field available on the CFOP website. This research has made use of the NASA Exoplanet Archive, which is operated by the California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under the Exoplanet Exploration Program. Kepler was competitively selected as the 10th mission of the Discovery Program. Funding for this mission is provided by NASA, Science Mission Directorate. Based on observations obtained with the Hobby–Eberly Telescope, which is a joint project of the University of Texas at Austin, the Pennsylvania State University, Stanford University, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and Georg-August-Universität Göttingen.

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Additional details

Identifiers

Eprint ID
61329
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20151020-112216543

Funding

NSF
AST-1109928
NASA
NNX12AD23G
NASA
NNX13AI76G-3
Korea Research Council for Fundamental Science and Technology
Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI)
2013-9-400-0/2014-1-400-06
NASA
NNX13AF20G
NASA
NNX12AQ62G
NASA
NNA09DA77
NASA
HST-GO-12548.06-A
NASA
NAS5-26555
European Research Council (ERC)
291352
NASA Postdoctoral Program
NSF
AST-1007992
NASA/JPL/Caltech

Dates

Created
2015-10-20
Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated
2021-11-10
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Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)