π Earth: A 3.14 day Earth-sized Planet from K2's Kitchen Served Warm by the SPECULOOS Team

Creators: Niraula, Prajwal; de Wit, Julien; Rackham, Benjamin V.; Ducrot, Elsa; Burdanov, Artem; Crossfield, Ian J. M.; Van Grootel, Valerie; Murray, Catriona; Garcia, Lionel J.; Alonso, Roi; Beard, Corey; Gomez Maqueo Chew, Yilen; Delrez, Laetitia; Demory, Brice-Olivier; Fulton, Benjamin J.; Gillon, Michaël; Günther, Maximilian N.; Howard, Andrew W.; Isaacson, Howard; Jehin, Emmanuel; Pedersen, Peter P.; Pozuelos, Francisco J.; Queloz, Didier; Rebolo-Lopez, Rafael; Sairam, Lalitha; Sebastian, Daniel; Thompson, Samantha; Triaud, Amaury H. M. J.

Abstract

We report on the discovery of a transiting Earth-sized (0.95 R_⊕) planet around an M3.5 dwarf star at 57 pc, EPIC 249631677. The planet has a period of ~3.14 days, i.e., ~π, with an installation of 7.45 S_⊕. The detection was made using publicly available data from K2's Campaign 15. We observed three additional transits with SPECULOOS Southern and Northern Observatories, and a stellar spectrum from Keck/HIRES, which allowed us to validate the planetary nature of the signal. The confirmed planet is well suited for comparative terrestrial exoplanetology. While exoplanets transiting ultracool dwarfs present the best opportunity for atmospheric studies of terrestrial exoplanets with the James Webb Space Telescope, those orbiting mid-M dwarfs within 100 pc such as EPIC 249631677b will become increasingly accessible with the next generation of observatories.

Additional Information

© 2020 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2020 June 9; revised 2020 July 17; accepted 2020 July 23; published 2020 September 21. This project makes use of publicly available K2 data. P.N. would like to acknowledge funding for Kerr Fellowship and Elliot Fellowship at MIT. J.d.W. and MIT gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Heising-Simons Foundation, Dr. and Mrs. Colin Masson and Dr. Peter A. Gilman for Artemis, the first telescope of the SPECULOOS network situated in Tenerife, Spain. B.V.R. thanks the Heising-Simons Foundation for support. V.V.G. is a F.R.S.-FNRS Research Associate. M.G. and E.J. are F.R.S.-FNRS Senior Research Associates. This work was also partially supported by a grant from the Simons Foundation (PI: Queloz, grant number 327127), and funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–2013) ERC Grant Agreement Number 336480, from the ARC grant for Concerted Research Actions financed by the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, from the Balzan Prize Foundation, from F.R.S-FNRS (Research Project ID T010920F), from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 803193/BEBOP), and from a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant No. RPG-2018–418. Facilities: Keck:I (HIRES) - , Kepler - , MAST (HLSP - , K2) - , SNO - , SSO. - Software: astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013, 2018), batman (Kreidberg 2015), emcee (Foreman-Mackey et al. 2013), isochrones (Morton 2015), prose (L. J. Garcia et al. 2020, in preparation), SPOCK (D. Sebastian & M. Gillon 2020, in preparation), transitleastsquares (Hippke & Heller 2019), wōtan (Hippke et al. 2019).

Attached Files

Published - Niraula_2020_AJ_160_172.pdf

Submitted - 2006.07308.pdf

Files

2006.07308.pdf

Files (13.9 MB)

Name	Size	Download all
2006.07308.pdf md5:472014b9cd8e8baa591d0e4d2298fa0d	1.7 MB	Preview Download
Niraula_2020_AJ_160_172.pdf md5:4252dc14be4085de539ef3cd37eaa03c	12.3 MB	Preview Download

Additional details

	All versions	This version
Views	0	0
Downloads	0	0
Data volume	0 Bytes	0 Bytes