An international team of astronomers using NASA’s Kepler space telescope has discovered a new exoplanet, named HIP 116454b.

HIP 116454b is located in the constellation Pisces, approximately 180 light-years from Earth.

It is a super-Earth exoplanet, with a diameter of 32,000 km – two and a half times the size of our planet – and a mass of almost 12 times that of Earth.

HIP 116454b circles a K1-type orange dwarf star, HIP 116454, once every 9.1 days at a distance of 13.5 million km.

The planet was discovered by Dr Andrew Vanderburg of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and his colleagues using NASA’s Kepler spacecraft during its second life, known as the K2 mission.

Kepler’s primary mission came to an end when the second of four reaction wheels used to stabilize the spacecraft failed. Without at least three functioning reaction wheels, Kepler couldn’t be pointed accurately.

Rather than giving up on the plucky space telescope, Dr Vanderburg’s team developed an ingenious strategy to use pressure from sunlight as a virtual reaction wheel. The resulting K2 mission promises to not only continue Kepler’s search for other worlds, but also introduce new opportunities to observe star clusters, active galaxies, and supernovae.

Kepler’s new life began with a nine-day test in February 2014. When the astronomers analyzed new data, they found that Kepler had detected a single planetary transit.

They confirmed the discovery with the Microvariability and Oscillations of STars satellite and the HARPS-North spectrograph on the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo in the Canary Islands.

“HIP 116454b will be a top target for telescopes on the ground and in space,” said team member Dr John Johnson, also from Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The scientific paper reporting the discovery of HIP 116454b has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal (arXiv.org preprint).

_____

Andrew Vanderburg et al. 2014. Characterizing K2 Planet Discoveries: A super-Earth transiting the bright K-dwarf HIP 116454. ApJ, accepted for publication; arXiv: 1412.5674