An international group of astronomers led by Dr Vincent Van Eylen of Aarhus University, Denmark, has discovered a Neptune-sized extrasolar planet orbiting one of the stars in a binary star system named Kepler-410.
This is an artist’s impression of the Kepler-410A system. Image credit: Vincent Van Eylen, apadted by Sci-New.com.
Kepler-410, also known as HD 175289 or KOI-42, lies in the constellation Lyra about 431 light-years away from Earth.
The binary system consists of the fast-rotating planet host star, Kepler-410A, and a fainter companion, Kepler-410B, which has complicated the confirmation of the planetary candidate. It has been observed for four years with the Kepler Space Telescope to look for small regularly-recurring dips in the light, which are indicative of the presence of an exoplanet.
The newly discovered alien world, dubbed Kepler-410Ab, has a radius of about 2.8 times that of Earth.
With a period of around 18 days, it is much closer to its star than Earth is to our Sun, and therefore unlikely to be suitable for life.
Perturbations on Kepler-410Ab indicate that there is likely another unknown exoplanet in the system.
“We are confident that there is another planet, but because it doesn’t move in front of the star, we don’t yet know what it is like,” Dr Van Eylen said.
According to a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal (arXiv.org), Kepler-410A is the third brightest confirmed planet host star in the Kepler field and one of the brightest hosts of all currently known transiting exoplanets.
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V. Van Eylen et al. 2014. What Asteroseismology can do for Exoplanets: Kepler-410A b is a Small Neptune around a Bright Star, in an Eccentric Orbit Consistent with Low Obliquity. ApJ 782, 14; doi: 10.1088/0004-637X/782/1/14
