KIC 12557548 - Disintegrating Terrestrial Planet

Evidence for the disintegration of KIC 12557548 b
http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.2988

So this Super-Mercury planet (KIC 12557548 b) is now confirmed?
http://exoplanet.eu/catalog/kic_12557548b/

So it seems. But the planetary mass (3 x Jupiter) is quite overabundant! I have got a more reliable value of 0.1 Earth masses from the first paper mentioning this exoplanet.

However EPE keeps listing 834 planet and 837 in catalog page (and double Kepler-47 (AB)b-c still there...). But this statement is offtopic.

Yeah the EPE isn't showing upper mass limits properly, if 3 M_J is indeed the upper mass limit. There's similar issues on some other planets.

Catastrophic Evaporation of Rocky Planets
http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.2147

Quote :

Short-period exoplanets can have dayside surface temperatures surpassing 2000 K, hot enough to vaporize rock and drive a thermal wind. Small enough planets evaporate completely. We construct a radiative-hydrodynamic model of atmospheric escape from strongly irradiated, low-mass rocky planets, accounting for dust-gas energy exchange in the wind. Rocky planets with masses < 0.1 M_Earth (less than twice the mass of Mercury) and surface temperatures > 2000 K are found to disintegrate entirely in < 10 Gyr. When our model is applied to Kepler planet candidate KIC 12557548b --- which is believed to be a rocky body evaporating at a rate of dM/dt ~ 1 M_Earth/Gyr --- our model yields a present-day planet mass of ~0.01 M_Earth or about the mass of the Moon. Mass loss rates depend so strongly on planet mass that bodies can reside on close-in orbits for Gyrs with initial masses similar to that of Mercury, before entering a final short-lived phase of catastrophic mass loss (which KIC 12557548b has entered). Because this catastrophic stage lasts only ~1% of the planet's life, we estimate that for every object like KIC 12557548b, there should be a few dozen close-in Mercury-sized progenitors whose direct transits might be detectable by Kepler with enough period folding. According to our calculations, KIC 12557548b has lost ~80% of its formation mass; today we may be observing its naked iron core.

If so, I guess that would take the record of smallest known planet away from PSR B1257+12A...

The Starspots - Transit Depth Relation of the Evaporating Planet Candidate KIC 12557548b
http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.1585

Apparently the mass loss appears to be correlated with the stellar activity, based on periodic variation of the transit depth at the same period as the rotation of the star. Mechanism for this is difficult to pin down.

The Relation between the Transit Depths of KIC 12557548b & the Stellar Rotation Period
http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.4289

They argue transits across star spots can explain the transit-depth/activity correlation.

Reduced activity from KIC 12557548b from ground-based observations.

Reduced Activity And Large Particles From the Disintegrating Planet Candidate KIC 12557548b
http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.07603