Zodiacal Exoplanets in Time (ZEIT) II. A "Super-Earth" Orbiting a Young K Dwarf in the Pleiades Neighborhood

TL;DR

This paper reports the discovery of a super-Earth-sized planet transiting a young K dwarf star in the Pleiades neighborhood, highlighting challenges in detecting planets in young clusters with short-duration K2 observations.

Contribution

First detection of a super-Earth in the Pleiades region using K2 data, with analysis of stellar properties and detection limitations in young star clusters.

Findings

Discovered a super-Earth-sized planet transiting a young K dwarf.

No additional planets found in the Pleiades candidate stars.

Detection efficiency is limited by short observation duration and stellar noise.

Abstract

We describe a "super-Earth"-size ($2.30\pm0.15R_{\oplus}$) planet transiting an early K-type dwarf star in the Campaign 4 field observed by the K2 mission. The host star, EPIC 210363145, was identified as a member of the approximately 120-Myr-old Pleiades cluster based on its kinematics and photometric distance. It is rotationally variable and exhibits near-ultraviolet emission consistent with a Pleiades age, but its rotational period is ~20 d and its spectrum contains no H$\alpha$ emission nor the Li I absorption expected of Pleiades K dwarfs. Instead, the star is probably an interloper that is unaffiliated with the cluster, but younger (< 1 Gyr) than the typical field dwarf. We ruled out a false positive transit signal produced by confusion with a background eclipsing binary by adaptive optics imaging and a statistical calculation. Doppler radial velocity measurements limit the companion mass to <2 times that of Jupiter. Screening of the lightcurves of 1014 potential Pleiades candidate stars uncovered no additional planets. An injection-and-recovery experiment using the K2 Pleiades lightcurves with simulated planets, assuming a planet population like that in the Kepler prime field, predicts only 0.8-1.8 detections (vs. ~20 in an equivalent Kepler sample). The absence of Pleiades planet detections can be attributed to the much shorter monitoring time of K2 (80 days vs. 4 years), increased measurement noise due to spacecraft motion, and the intrinsic noisiness of the stars.