@article{23bf02a3c7e84787abd4313d1d809259,
title = "Back to “normal” for the disintegrating planet candidate KIC 12557548 B",
abstract = " KIC 12557548 b is the first of a growing class of intriguing disintegrating planet candidates, which lose mass in the form of a metal-rich vapor that condenses into dust particles. Here, we follow up on two perplexing observations of the system: (1) the transits appeared shallower than average in 2013 and 2014, and (2) the parameters derived from a high-resolution spectrum of the star differed from other results using photometry and low-resolution spectroscopy. We observe five transits of the system with the 61-inch Kuiper telescope in 2016 and show that they are consistent with photometry from the Kepler spacecraft in 2009-2013, suggesting that the dusty tail has returned to normal length and mass. We also evaluate high-resolution archival spectra from the Subaru HDS spectrograph and find them to be consistent with a main-sequence T eff = 4440 ± 70 K star in agreement with the photometry and low-resolution spectroscopy. This disfavors the hypothesis that planet disintegration affected the analysis of prior high-resolution spectra of this star. We apply Principal Component Analysis to the Kepler long-cadence data to understand the modes of disintegration. There is a tentative 491-day periodicity of the second principal component, which corresponds to possible long-term evolution of the dust grain sizes, though the mechanism on such long timescales remains unclear. ",
keywords = "Comets: general, Eclipses, Planets and satellites: dynamical evolution and stability, Stars: fundamental parameters, Stars: individual",
author = "Everett Schlawin and Teruyuki Hirano and Hajima Kawahara and Johanna Teske and Green, {Elizabeth M.} and Rackham, {Benjamin V.} and Jonathan Fraine and Rafia Bushra",
note = "Funding Information: The authors thank Kento Masuda for sharing the 2015 Subaru spectrum of KIC 1255 and giving helpful comments on this work. Funding for E.S. is provided by NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center. The authors thank Saul Rappaport for helpful comments. We also thank Ben Weiner for some useful discussion on high-resolution spectroscopy. This work was supported by the Japan Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI grant No. JP16K17660. Support for this work was provided by NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF2-51399.001 awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS5-26555. This research has made use of the VizieR catalog access tool, CDS, Strasbourg, France. The original description of the VizieR service was published in Ochsenbein et al. (2000). This work has made use of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia (https://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia), processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC, https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dpac/consortium). Funding for the DPAC has been provided by national institutions, in particular the institutions participating in the Gaia Multilateral Agreement. This publication makes use of data products from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The results reported herein benefited from collaborations and/or information exchange within NASA's Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS) research coordination network sponsored by NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2018. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.",
year = "2018",
month = dec,
doi = "10.3847/1538-3881/aaeb32",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "156",
journal = "Astronomical Journal",
issn = "0004-6256",
publisher = "IOP Publishing Ltd.",
number = "6",
}