Kepler-62: Habitable planet candidate(s?) in 5-planet system

Led_Zep wrote:

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/prnewswire-space-news.html?doc=201304151432PR_NEWS_USPR_____DC94898&showRelease=1&dir=0&categories=AEROSPACE-AND-SPACE-EXPLORATION&andorquestion=OR&&passDir=0,1,2,3,4,5,6,15,17,34

NASA will host a news briefing at 2 p.m. EDT, Thursday, April 18, to announce new discoveries from the agency's Kepler mission.

The link doesnt work.

Try this one :

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2013/apr/HQ_M13-062_Kepler_Briefing.html

WASHINGTON -- NASA will host a news briefing at 2 p.m. EDT, Thursday, April 18, to announce new discoveries from the agency's Kepler mission.

I found this: Kepler-62, a system with 5 planets (?), 2 (e and f) are in the habitable zone and theire are the smallest know in this situation.
http://www.punemirror.in/article/26/201304182013041808201215384b16f8/Astronomers-discover-Earthlike-exoplanet.html

Space.com
http://www.space.com/20720-earth-like-alien-planets-discovery.html

Also the Centauri Dreams take on it.
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=27261

Seems to be a significant gap between planets d and e (periods differ by a factor of ~6.7). Maybe there's room for an additional planet there, perhaps one too small to be detected or in an inclined orbit?

Here is the Science Article

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2013/04/17/science.1234702

Kepler-62 system is KOI-701

NASA link for completeness. Filled with epic graphics.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/news/kepler-62-kepler-69.html

Oh my, it's a K2 dwarf! A fairly metal-poor one, at that. It's like 40 Eridani A, or HD 4628…

Rather faint, though. Magnitude 13-and-three-quarters is impractical for RV followup, as seen by the ~3 m/s precision on the Keck spectra, and without significant TTVs there isn't any mass determination coming anytime soon.

The supplementary material doesn't give the radii, but they are on the Kepler discoveries page. d rides towards the top of super-Earth, e, f and b lie towards the middle of super-Earth - but c? 0.54 Earth radii! That's tiddly! the paper says Mars-radius, which is indeed appropriate.


It's interesting to see the architecture of >3 planet super-Earth through (very) sub-Earth systems that are popping up as RV detection limits are going down and Kepler… be…'s Kepler. Within one system, orbital periods range from a week or three to several hundred days, such as in HD 40307 or Tau Ceti… are formation mechanisms really that efficient at forming in situ, or is migration… selective? It's something to find out.

post-editing usurption modification: Holy cassowary, NASA really can pump out those pretty pictures! Now it's time to plaster them all over the media.

Paper from arXiv :

http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.5058

Water Planets in the Habitable Zone: Atmospheric Chemistry, Observable Features, and the case of Kepler-62e and -62f

Water planets in the habitable zone are expected to have distinct geophysics and geochemistry of their surfaces and atmospheres. We explore these properties motivated by two key questions: whether such planets could provide habitable conditions and whether they exhibit discernable spectral features that distinguish a water planet from a rocky Earth-like planet. We show that the recently discovered planets Kepler-62e and -62f are the first viable candidates for habitable zone water planet. We use these planets as test cases for discussing those differences in detail. We generate atmospheric spectral models and find that potentially habitable water planets show a distinctive spectral fingerprint in transit depending on their position in the habitable zone.

Briefing on NASA TV :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQVlDqOchSA&feature=player_embedded

Another paper k-62 http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1304/1304.7387.pdf .Measurement of massess of the planets kepler 62 b,d could be feasible in near future

Isn't that the discovery paper (the one published in Science)?

http://www.space.com/30260-earth-sized-planet-could-have-oceans.html

A small, rocky planet could host liquid water on its surface, if it also contains a carbon-dioxide atmosphere, researchers say.
The planet, which scientists have dubbed Kepler-62f, has a diameter 40 percent larger than that of Earth, and could contain oceans of water if its atmosphere keeps the planet warm