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A unique short-period Mercury-size Kepler exoplanet candidate KIC012557548b has been discovered recently by Rappaport et al. (2012). This object is a transiting disintegrating exoplanet with a circum-planetary material - comet-like tail. Close-in exoplanets, like KIC012557548b, are subjected to the greatest planet-star interactions. This interaction may have various forms. In certain cases it may cause formation of the comet-like tail. Strong interaction with the host star, and/or presence of an additional planet may lead to variations in the orbital period of the planet. Our main aim is to search for comet-like tails similar to KIC012557548b and for long-term orbital period variations. We are curious about frequency of comet-like tail formation among short-period Kepler exoplanet candidates. We concentrate on a sample of 20 close-in candidates with a period similar to KIC012557548b from the Kepler mission.
The census of exoplanets is incomplete for orbital distances larger than 1 AU. Here, we present 41 long-period planet candidates in 38 systems identified by Planet Hunters based on Kepler archival data (Q0-Q17). Among them, 17 exhibit only one transit, 14 have two visible transits and 10 have more than three visible transits. For planet candidates with only one visible transit, we estimate their orbital periods based on transit duration and host star properties. The majority of the planet candidates in this work (75%) have orbital periods that correspond to distances of 1-3 AU from their host stars. We conduct follow-up imaging and spectroscopic observations to validate and characterize planet host stars. In total, we obtain adaptive optics images for 33 stars to search for possible blending sources. Six stars have stellar companions within 4. We obtain high-resolution spectra for 6 stars to determine their physical properties. Stellar properties for other stars are obtained from the NASA Exoplanet Archive and the Kepler Stellar Catalog by Huber et al. (2014). We validate 7 planet candidates that have planet confidence over 0.997 (3-{sigma} level). These validated planets include 3 single-transit planets (KIC-3558849b, KIC-5951458b, and KIC-8540376c), 3 planets with double transits (KIC-8540376b, KIC-9663113b, and KIC-10525077b), and 1 planet with 4 transits (KIC-5437945b). This work provides assessment regarding the existence of planets at wide separations and the associated false positive rate for transiting observation (17%-33%). More than half of the long-period planets with at least three transits in this paper exhibit transit timing variations up to 41 hours, which suggest additional components that dynamically interact with the transiting planet candidates. The nature of these components can be determined by follow-up radial velocity and transit observations.
In this paper we report a new transiting warm giant planet: KOI-1257 b. It was first detected in photometry as a planet-candidate by the ${it Kepler}$ space telescope and then validated thanks to a radial velocity follow-up with the SOPHIE spectrograph. It orbits its host star with a period of 86.647661 d $pm$ 3 s and a high eccentricity of 0.772 $pm$ 0.045. The planet transits the main star of a metal-rich, relatively old binary system with stars of mass of 0.99 $pm$ 0.05 Msun and 0.70 $ pm $ 0.07 Msun for the primary and secondary, respectively. This binary system is constrained thanks to a self-consistent modelling of the ${it Kepler}$ transit light curve, the SOPHIE radial velocities, line bisector and full-width half maximum (FWHM) variations, and the spectral energy distribution. However, future observations are needed to confirm it. The PASTIS fully-Bayesian software was used to validate the nature of the planet and to determine which star of the binary system is the transit host. By accounting for the dilution from the binary both in photometry and in radial velocity, we find that the planet has a mass of 1.45 $ pm $ 0.35 Mjup, and a radius of 0.94 $ pm $ 0.12 Rjup, and thus a bulk density of 2.1 $ pm $ 1.2 g.cm$^{-3}$. The planet has an equilibrium temperature of 511 $pm$ 50 K, making it one of the few known members of the warm-jupiter population. The HARPS-N spectrograph was also used to observe a transit of KOI-1257 b, simultaneously with a joint amateur and professional photometric follow-up, with the aim of constraining the orbital obliquity of the planet. However, the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect was not clearly detected, resulting in poor constraints on the orbital obliquity of the planet.
The vast majority of the 4700 confirmed planets and planet candidates discovered by the Kepler mission were first found by the Kepler pipeline. In the pipeline, after a transit signal is found, all data points associated with those transits are removed, creating a Swiss cheese-like light curve full of holes, which is then used for subsequent transit searches. These holes could render an additional planet undetectable (or lost). We examine a sample of 114 stars with $3+$ confirmed planets to evaluate the effect of this Swiss cheesing. A simulation determines that the probability that a transiting planet is lost due to the transit masking is low, but non-negligible, reaching a plateau at $sim3.3%$ lost in the period range of $P=400-500$ days. We then model all planet transits and subtract out the transit signals for each star, restoring the in-transit data points, and use the Kepler pipeline to search the transit-subtracted (i.e., transit-cleaned) light curves. However, the pipeline did not discover any credible new transit signals. This demonstrates the validity and robustness of the Kepler pipelines choice to use transit masking over transit subtraction. However, a follow-up visual search through all the transit-subtracted data, which allows for easier visual identification of new transits, revealed the existence of a new, Neptune-sized exoplanet (Kepler-150 f) and a potential single transit of a likely false positive (Kepler-208). Kepler-150 f ($P=637.2$ days, $R_{rm{P}}=3.64^{+0.52}_{-0.39}$ R$_{oplus}$) is confirmed with $>99.998%$ confidence using a combination of the planet multiplicity argument, a false positive probability analysis, and a transit duration analysis.
We analyze data from the Quarter 1-17 Data Release 24 (Q1--Q17 DR24) planet candidate catalog from NASAs Kepler mission, specifically comparing systems with single transiting planets to systems with multiple transiting planets, and identify a distinct population of exoplanets with a necessarily distinct system architecture. Such an architecture likely indicates a different branch in their evolutionary past relative to the typical Kepler system. The key feature of these planetary systems is an isolated, Earth-sized planet with a roughly one-day orbital period. We estimate that at least 24 of the 144 systems we examined (>~17%) are members of this population. Accounting for detection efficiency, such planetary systems occur with a frequency similar to the hot Jupiters.
A large fraction of known exoplanets have short orbital periods where tidal excitation of gravity waves within the host star causes the planets orbits to decay. We study the effects of tidal resonance locking, in which the planet locks into resonance with a tidally excited stellar gravity mode. Because a stars gravity mode frequencies typically increase as the star evolves, the planets orbital frequency increases in lockstep, potentially causing much faster orbital decay than predicted by other tidal theories. Due to nonlinear mode damping, resonance locking in Sun-like stars likely only operates for low-mass planets ($M lesssim 0.1 , M_{rm Jup}$), but in stars with convective cores it can likely operate for all planetary masses. The orbital decay timescale with resonance locking is typically comparable to the stars main-sequence lifetime, corresponding to a wide range in effective stellar quality factor ($10^3 lesssim Q lesssim 10^9$), depending on the planets mass and orbital period. We make predictions for several individual systems and examine the orbital evolution resulting from both resonance locking and nonlinear wave dissipation. Our models demonstrate how short-period massive planets can be quickly destroyed by nonlinear mode damping, while short-period low-mass planets can survive, even though they undergo substantial inward tidal migration via resonance locking.