The Mass of Kepler-93b and the Composition of Terrestrial Planets
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Author
Dumusque, Xavier
Gettel, Sara
Pepe, Francesco
Collier Cameron, Andrew
Molinari, Emilio
Udry, Stéphane
Affer, Laura
Bonomo, Aldo S.
Buchhave, Lars A.
Cosentino, Rosario
Figueira, Pedro
Fiorenzano, Aldo F. M.
Harutyunyan, Avet
Lopez-Morales, Mercedes
Lovis, Christophe
Malavolta, Luca
Mayor, Michel
Micela, Giusi
Motalebi, Fatemeh
Nascimbeni, Valerio
Piotto, Giampaolo
Pollacco, Don
Queloz, Didier
Rice, Ken
Ségransan, Damien
Sozzetti, Alessandro
Watson, Chris
Note: Order does not necessarily reflect citation order of authors.
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https://doi.org/10.1088/0004-637X/800/2/135Metadata
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Dressing, Courtney D., David Charbonneau, Xavier Dumusque, Sara Gettel, Francesco Pepe, Andrew Collier Cameron, David W. Latham, et al. 2015. “The Mass of Kepler-93b and the Composition of Terrestrial Planets.” The Astrophysical Journal 800 (2) (February 20): 135. doi:10.1088/0004-637x/800/2/135.Abstract
Kepler-93b is a 1.478 ± 0.019 R⊕ planet with a 4.7 day period around a bright (V = 10.2), astroseismically characterized host star with a mass of 0.911 ± 0.033 M and a radius of 0.919 ± 0.011 R. Based on 86 radial velocity observations obtained with the HARPS-N spectrograph on the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo and 32 archival Keck/HIRES observations, we present a precise mass estimate of 4.02±0.68 M⊕. The corresponding high density of 6.88±1.18 g cm−3 is consistent with a rocky composition of primarily iron and magnesium silicate. We compare Kepler-93b to other dense planets with well-constrained parameters and find that between 1 and 6 M⊕, all dense planets including the Earth and Venus are well-described by the same fixed ratio of iron to magnesium silicate.There are as of yet no examples of such planets with masses > 6 M⊕. All known planets in this mass regime have lower densities requiring significant fractions of volatiles or H/He gas. We also constrain the mass and period of the outer companion in the Kepler-93 system from the long-term radial velocity trend and archival adaptive optics images. As the sample of dense planets with well-constrained masses and radii continues to grow, we will be able to test whether the fixed compositional model found for the seven dense planets considered in this paper extends to the full population of 1–6 M⊕ planets.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.8687Terms of Use
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