Artist’s impression of Kepler-22b as an oceanic “super-Earth” within its star’s habitable zone. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_potentially_habitable_exoplanets.
At Friday’s journal club, we discussed a recent paper from Montet et al. (2015) that follows up on discovery of planetary candidates observed by the K2 Mission from Foreman-Mackey and colleagues.
Montet and colleagues combined high-spatial resolution and ground-based spectral observations, along with re-analysis of the K2 data, to confirm or refute the planetary status of earlier discoveries. They were able to validate 18 of the original 36 as planets, including a sub-Neptune planet, EPIC 201912552, orbiting a relatively bright M-dwarf star.
As Montet et al. point out, this object is a great candidate for follow-up observations. In fact, it looks like we could see it from Boise State’s Challis Observatory.
Friday’s attendees included Jennifer Briggs, Nathan Grigsby, Catherine Hartman, Tanier Jaramillo, Emily Jensen, and Liz Kandziolka.