TOI-1468: A system of two transiting planets, a super-Earth and a mini-Neptune, on opposite sides of the radius valley

Full list of authors: Chaturvedi, P.; Bluhm, P.; Nagel, E.; Hatzes, A. P.; Morello, G.; Brady, M.; Korth, J.; Molaverdikhani, K.; Kossakowski, D.; Caballero, J. A.; Guenther, E. W.; Palle, E.; Espinoza, N.; Seifahrt, A.; Lodieu, N.; Cifuentes, C.; Furlan, E.; Amado, P. J.; Barclay, T.; Bean, J.; Bejar, V. J. S.; Bergond, G.; Boyle, A. W.; Ciardi, D.; Collins, K. A.; Collins, K., I; Esparza-Borges, E.; Fukui, A.; Gnilka, C. L.; Goeke, R.; Guerra, P.; Henning, Th; Herrero, E.; Howell, S. B.; Jeffers, S., V; Jenkins, J. M.; Jensen, E. L. N.; Kasper, D.; Kodama, T.; Latham, D. W.; Lopez-Gonzalez, M. J.; Luque, R.; Montes, D.; Morales, J. C.; Mori, M.; Murgas, F.; Narita, N.; Nowak, G.; Parviainen, H.; Passegger, V. M.; Quirrenbach, A.; Reffert, S.; Reiners, A.; Ribas, I; Ricker, G. R.; Rodriguez, E.; Rodriguez-Lopez, C.; Schlecker, M.; Schwarz, R. P.; Schweitzer, A.; Seager, S.; Stefansson, G.; Stockdale, C.; Tal-Or, L.; Twicken, J. D.; Vanaverbeke, S.; Wang, G.; Watanabe, D.; Winn, J. N.; Zechmeister, M.--This is an Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
We report the discovery and characterization of two small transiting planets orbiting the bright M3.0V star TOI-1468 (LSPM J0106+1913), whose transit signals were detected in the photometric time series in three sectors of the TESS mission. We confirm the planetary nature of both of them using precise radial velocity measurements from the CARMENES and MAROON-X spectrographs, and supplement them with ground-based transit photometry. A joint analysis of all these data reveals that the shorter-period planet, TOI-1468 b (Pb = 1.88 d), has a planetary mass of Mb = 3.21 ± 0.24M⊕ and a radius of Rb = 1.280−0.039+0.038 R⊕, resulting in a density of ρb = 8.39−0.92+1.05 g cm−3, which is consistent with a mostly rocky composition. For the outer planet, TOI-1468 c (Pc = 15.53 d), we derive a mass of Mc = 6.64−0.68+0.67 M⊕,aradius of Rc = 2.06 ± 0.04 R⊕, and a bulk density of ρc = 2.00−0.19+0.21 g cm−3, which corresponds to a rocky core composition with a H/He gas envelope. These planets are located on opposite sides of the radius valley, making our system an interesting discovery as there are only a handful of other systems with the same properties. This discovery can further help determine a more precise location of the radius valley for small planets around M dwarfs and, therefore, shed more light on planet formation and evolution scenarios. © P. Chaturvedi et al. 2022.
CARMENES is an instrument at the Centro Astronómico Hispano en Andalucía (CAHA) at Calar Alto (Almería, Spain), operated jointly by the Junta de Andalucía and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (CSIC). CARMENES was funded by the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (MPG), the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through projects FICTS-2011-02, ICTS-2017-07-CAHA-4, and CAHA16-CE-3978, and the members of the CARMENES Consortium (Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie, Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Landessternwarte Königstuhl, Institut de Ciències de l’Espai, Institut für Astrophysik Göttingen, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Thüringer Landessternwarte Tautenburg, Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Hamburger Sternwarte, Centro de Astrobiología and Centro Astronómico Hispano-Alemán), with additional contributions by the MINECO, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) through the Major Research Instrumentation Programme and Research Unit FOR2544 “Blue Planets around Red Stars”, the Klaus Tschira Stiftung, the states of Baden-Württemberg and Niedersachsen, and by the Junta de Andalucía. This work was based on data from the CARMENES data archive at CAB (CSIC-INTA). Funding for the TESS mission is provided by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. We acknowledge the use of public TESS data from pipelines at the TESS Science Office and at the TESS Science Processing Operations Center. This research has made use of the Exoplanet Follow-up Observation Program website, which is operated by the California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under the Exo-planet Exploration Program. Resources supporting this work were provided by the NASA High-End Computing (HEC) Program through the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames Research Center for the production of the SPOC data products. This paper includes data collected by the TESS mission that are publicly available from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). The development of the MAROON-X spectrograph was funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the Gemini Observatory, and the University of Chicago. The MAROON-X team acknowledges support for this work from the NSF (award number 2108465) and NASA (through the TESS Cycle 4 GI program, grant number 80NSSC22K0117). This work was enabled by observations made from the Gemini North telescope, located within the Maunakea Science Reserve and adjacent to the summit of Maunakea. We are grateful for the privilege of observing the Universe from a place that is unique in both its astronomical quality and its cultural significance. Data were partly collected with the 150-cm telescope at Observatorio de Sierra Nevada (OSN), operated by the Instituto de Astrofífica de Andalucía (IAA, CSIC), with the MuSCAT2 instrument, developed by ABC, at Telescopio Carlos Sánchez operated on the island of Tenerife by the IAC in the Spanish Observatorio del Teide, with the Telescopi Joan Oró (TJO) of the Observatori Astronómic del Montsed (OdM), which is owned by the Generalitat de Catalunya and operated by the Institute for Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC), and with the LCOFT network (part of the LCOGT telescope time was granted by NOIRLab through the Mid-Scale Innovations Program (MSIP), which is funded by the National Science Foundation). Some of the Observations in the paper made use of the High-Resolution Imaging instrument. ‘Alopeke. ‘Alopeke was funded by the NASA Exoplanet Exploration Program and built at the NASA Ames Research Center by Steve B. Howell, Nic Scott, Elliott P. Horch, and Emmett Quigley. Data were reduced using a software pipeline originally written by Elliott Horch and Mark Everett. ‘Alopeke was mounted on the Gemini North telescope of the international Gemini Observatory, a program of NSF s OIR Lab, which is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. on behalf of the Gemini partnership: the National Science Foundation (United States), National Research Council (Canada), Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (Chile), Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (Argentina), Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia, Inovações e Comunicações (Brazil), and Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (Republic of Korea). We acknowledge financial support from: the Thüringer Ministerium für Wirtschaft, Wissenschaft und Digitale Gesellschaft; the Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigación of the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación and the ERDF “A way of making Europe” through projects PID2019-109522GB-C5[1:4], PID2019-107061GB-C64, PID2019-110689RB-100, PGC2018-098153-B-C31, and the Centre of Excellence “Severo Ochoa” and “María de Maeztu” awards to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (CEX2019-000920-S), Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (SEV-2017-0709), and Centro de Astrobiología (MDM-2017-0737); the Generalitat de Catalunya/CERCA programme; the European Union s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 895525; the DFG through grant CH 2636/1-1, the Excellence Cluster ORIGINS under Germany’s Excellence Strategy (EXC-2094 – 390783311), and priority programme SPP 1992 “Exploring the Diversity of Extrasolar Planets” (JE 701/5-1); the Swedish National Space Agency (SNSA; DNR 2020-00104); the JSPS KAKENHI grants JP17H04574, JP18H05439, JP21K13975, Grant-in-Aid for JSPS fellows grant JP20J21872, JST CREST Grant Number JPMJCR1761, and the Astrobiology Center of National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) through grants AB031010 and AB031014; and the program “Alien Earths” (supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under agreement No. 80NSSC21K0593) for NASA’s Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS) research coordination network sponsored by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.