Status Report

GJ 367b: A dense ultra-short period sub-Earth planet transiting a nearby red dwarf star

By SpaceRef Editor
December 3, 2021
Filed under , , ,

Kristine W. F. Lam, Szilárd Csizmadia, Nicola Astudillo-Defru, Xavier Bonfils, Davide Gandolfi, Sebastiano Padovan, Massimiliano Esposito, Coel Hellier, Teruyuki Hirano, John Livingston, Felipe Murgas, Alexis M. S. Smith, Karen A. Collins, Savita Mathur, Rafael A. Garcia, Steve B. Howell, Nuno C. Santos, Fei Dai, George R. Ricker, Roland Vanderspek, David W. Latham, Sara Seager, Joshua N. Winn, Jon M. Jenkins, Simon Albrecht, Jose M. Almenara, Etienne Artigau, Oscar Barragán, François Bouchy, Juan Cabrera, David Charbonneau, Priyanka Chaturvedi, Alexander Chaushev, Jessie L. Christiansen, William D. Cochran, José R. De Meideiros, Xavier Delfosse, Rodrigo F. Díaz, René Doyon, Philipp Eigmüller, Pedro Figueira, Thierry Forveille, Malcolm Fridlund, Guillaume Gaisné, Elisa Goffo, Iskra Georgieva, Sascha Grziwa, Eike Guenther, Artie P. Hatzes, Marshall C. Johnson, Petr Kabáth, Emil Knudstrup, Judith Korth, Pablo Lewin, Jack J. Lissauer, Christophe Lovis, Rafael Luque, Claudio Melo, Edward H. Morgan, Robert Morris, Michel Mayor, Norio Narita, Hannah L. M. Osborne, Enric Palle, Francesco Pepe, Carina M. Persson, Samuel N. Quinn, Heike Rauer, Seth Redfield, Joshua E. Schlieder, Damien Ségransan, Luisa M. Serrano, Jeffrey C. Smith, Ján Šubjak, Joseph D. Twicken, Stéphane Udry, Vincent Van Eylen, Michael Vezie

Ultra-short-period (USP) exoplanets have orbital periods shorter than one day. Precise masses and radii of USPs could provide constraints on their unknown formation and evolution processes. We report the detection and characterization of the USP planet GJ 367b using high precision photometry and radial velocity observations. GJ 367b orbits a bright (V-band magnitude = 10.2), nearby, red (M-type) dwarf star every 7.7 hours. GJ 367b has a radius of 0.718±0.054 Earth-radii, a mass of 0.546±0.078 Earth-masses, making it a sub-Earth. The corresponding bulk density is 8.106±2.165 g cm−3, close to that of iron. An interior structure model predicts the planet has an iron core radius fraction of 86±5%, similar to Mercury’s interior.

Comments: Note: “This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here by permission of the AAAS for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Science , (2021-12-03), doi: 10.1126/science.aay3253”

Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)

DOI: 10.1126/science.aay3253

Cite as: arXiv:2112.01309 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2112.01309v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)

Submission history

From: Kristine Wai Fun Lam 

[v1] Thu, 2 Dec 2021 15:13:28 UTC (4,378 KB)

https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.01309

SpaceRef staff editor.