Prajwal Niraula Contributes to Discovery of 3 'Super-Earths'

2017 Sep 21

Graduate student Prajwal Niraula, together with Associate Professor of Astronomy Seth Redfield, led a team of scientists in discovering three planets, or super-Earths, transiting around a nearby star, just 98 light-years away, using the Kepler Space Telescope. This is the closest planetary system that Kepler has ever found.

Niraula co-authored a paper on the discovery, which was submitted to the American Astronomical Society Journals for publication in early September.

Reflecting on the excitement of discovering the system, Niraula said the team had encountered false positives before so they were careful to look into it thoroughly.

"In the past, it turned out either to be false positives or systematics, which is often the case for an untrained eye working with K2 data," explains Niraula. "By the time we had found GJ9827, I got better at recognizing false positives. It was interesting when we found a planet in the system, but then on further analysis, we found two more signals. That is when we knew for sure it was a planetary signal, as multiple planetary systems have very small false-positive rates. We were also really excited to find that this is the nearest target to have planets in the K2 campaign."

"I have been super impressed with how Prajwal has risen to this challenge," said Redfield. "This will be an impactful paper that will be great for his career."