Zodiacal Exoplanets in Time (ZEIT) VII: A Temperate Candidate Super-Earth in the Hyades Cluster

TL;DR

This paper reports the potential discovery of a super-Earth exoplanet candidate in the Hyades cluster with a long orbital period and Earth-like insolation, offering a rare opportunity to study planetary evolution in a less irradiated environment.

Contribution

It presents the detection of a long-period transiting planet candidate in a young open cluster, expanding the parameter space for studying planetary evolution.

Findings

Candidate has a period ~100 days and receives Earth-like flux.

If confirmed, it would be the longest-period transiting planet in a cluster.

The host star is the brightest known for such a planet.

Abstract

Transiting exoplanets in young open clusters present opportunities to study how exoplanets evolve over their lifetimes. Recently, significant progress detecting transiting planets in young open clusters has been made with the K2 mission, but so far all of these transiting cluster planets orbit close to their host stars, so planet evolution can only be studied in a high-irradiation regime. Here, we report the discovery of a long-period planet candidate, called HD 283869 b, orbiting a member of the Hyades cluster. Using data from the K2 mission, we detected a single transit of a super-Earth-sized (1.96 +/- 0.12 R_earth) planet candidate orbiting the K-dwarf HD 283869 with a period longer than 72 days. Since we only detected a single transit event, we cannot validate HD 283869 b with high confidence, but our analysis of the K2 images, archival data, and follow-up observations suggests that the source of the event is indeed a transiting planet. We estimated the candidate's orbital parameters and find that if real, it has a period P~100 days and receives approximately Earth-like incident flux, giving the candidate a 71% chance of falling within the circumstellar habitable zone. If confirmed, HD 283869 b would have the longest orbital period, lowest incident flux, and brightest host star of any known transiting planet in an open cluster, making it uniquely important to future studies of how stellar irradiation affects planetary evolution.