Transiting exoplanets from the CoRoT space mission I - CoRoT-Exo-1b: a low-density short-period planet around a G0V star

TL;DR

This paper reports the discovery and characterization of CoRoT-Exo-1b, the first planet found by the CoRoT mission, a low-density, short-period exoplanet orbiting a G0V star, using photometric transit data and Doppler measurements.

Contribution

It presents the first detection and detailed characterization of a transiting exoplanet by the CoRoT mission, including its mass, radius, and density.

Findings

Planet has a radius of 1.49 Rjup.

Planet's mass is 1.03 Mjup.

Planet has a very low density of 0.38 g/cm^3.

Abstract

Context. The pioneer space mission for photometric planet searches, CoRoT, steadily monitors about 12,000 stars in each of its fields of view; it is able to detect transit candidates early in the processing of the data and before the end of a run. Aims. We report the detection of the first planet discovered by CoRoT and characterizing it with the help of follow-up observations. Methods. Raw data were filtered from outliers and residuals at the orbital period of the satellite. The orbital parameters and the radius of the planet were estimated by best fitting the phase folded light curve with 34 successive transits. Doppler measurements with the SOPHIE spectrograph permitted us to secure the detection and to estimate the planet mass. Results. The accuracy of the data is very high with a dispersion in the 2.17 min binned phase-folded light curve that does not exceed 3.10-4 in flux unit. The planet orbits a mildly metal-poor G0V star of magnitude V=13.6 in 1.5 days. The estimated mass and radius of the star are 0.95+-0.15Msun and 1.11+-0.05Rsun. We find the planet has a radius of 1.49+-0.08Rjup, a mass of 1.03+-0.12Mjup, and a particularly low mean density of 0.38 +-0.05g cm-3.