December 18, 2014
Despite a malfunction that ended its primary mission in May 2013, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has discovered a new super-Earth using data collected during its “second life,” known as the K2 mission.
University of Hawaiʻi astronomer Christoph Baranec supplied confirming data with his Robo-AO instrument mounted on the Palomar 1.5-meter telescope, and former UH graduate student Brendan Bowler, now a Joint Center for Planetary Astronomy postdoctoral fellow at Caltech, provided additional confirming observations using the Keck II adaptive optics system on Maunakea.
During a nine-day test in February 2014 Kepler detected a single planetary transit. The newfound planet, HIP 116454b, has a diameter of 20,000 miles, two and a half times the size of Earth, and weighs almost 12 times as much as Earth. This makes HIP 116454b a super-Earth, a class of planets that doesn’t exist in our solar system.
During the process of verifying the discovery, Harvard astronomer and study co-author John Johnson, a former postdoctoral fellow at the UH Institute for Astronomy, contacted Baranec and the Robo-AO team to obtain high-resolution imaging of HIP 116454 to determine whether it has very nearby stellar companions that could be contaminating the Kepler data, causing a misestimation of the planet’s size and other characteristics.
“Because of the flexible nature of the Robo-AO system, it was possible to add the target to the Robo-AO intelligent queue and several observations were carried out within days of the request,” said Baranec.
While Robo-AO didn’t find any stellar companions, some additional follow-up measurements hinted that there might be a companion that is too close for Robo-AO to see. To be absolutely sure there were no contaminating companions, Bowler was asked to observe HIP 116454 with the Keck II adaptive optics system. He confirmed that HIP 116454 has no close-in stellar companions.
The research paper reporting this discovery has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.
Read the Institute for Astronomy’s news release for more on the discovery.
