The First Kepler Mission Planet Confirmed With The Hobby-Eberly Telescope: Kepler-15b, a Hot Jupiter Enriched In Heavy Elements
Michael Endl, Phillip J. MacQueen, William D. Cochran, Erik Brugamyer,, Lars A. Buchhave, Jason Rowe, Phillip Lucas, Howard Issacson, Steve Bryson,, Steve B. Howell, Jonathan J. Fortney, Terese Hansen, William J. Borucki,, Douglas Caldwell, Jessie L. Christiansen

TL;DR
This paper reports the first Kepler planet confirmed with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, Kepler-15b, a hot Jupiter with significant heavy element enrichment, using combined photometric and spectroscopic data to determine its properties.
Contribution
It demonstrates the use of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope for precise radial velocity confirmation of Kepler planets, revealing Kepler-15b's heavy element enrichment and detailed planetary parameters.
Findings
Kepler-15b is a hot Jupiter with 0.66 Jupiter masses.
The planet shows significant heavy element enrichment, with 30-40 Earth masses of heavy elements.
The host star is metal-rich with [Fe/H]=0.36.
Abstract
We report the discovery of Kepler-15b, a new transiting exoplanet detected by NASA's Kepler mission. The transit signal with a period of 4.94 days was detected in the quarter 1 (Q1) Kepler photometry. For the first time, we have used the High-Resolution-Spectrograph (HRS) at the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) to determine the mass of a Kepler planet via precise radial velocity (RV) measurements. The 24 HET/HRS radial velocities (RV) and 6 additional measurements from the FIES spectrograph at the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT) reveal a Doppler signal with the same period and phase as the transit ephemeris. We used one HET/HRS spectrum of Kepler-15 taken without the iodine cell to determine accurate stellar parameters. The host star is a metal-rich ([Fe/H]=0.36+/-0.07) G-type main sequence star with T_eff=5515+/-124 K. The amplitude of the RV-orbit yields a mass of the planet of 0.66+/-0.1…
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Taxonomy
TopicsStellar, planetary, and galactic studies · Astronomy and Astrophysical Research · Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies
