• DOI:10.1086/346073
• Corpus ID: 18430973

A Mass for the Extrasolar Planet Gliese 876b Determined from Hubble Space Telescope Fine Guidance Sensor 3 Astrometry and High-Precision Radial Velocities

@article{Benedict2002AMF,
  title={A Mass for the Extrasolar Planet Gliese 876b Determined from Hubble Space Telescope Fine Guidance Sensor 3 Astrometry and High-Precision Radial Velocities},
  author={G. Fritz Benedict and Barbara E. Mcarthur and Thierry Forveille and Xavier Delfosse and Edmund P. Nelan and R. Paul Butler and William John Spiesman and Geoff Marcy and Bertrand Goldman and Christian Perrier and William H. Jefferys and Michel Mayor},
  journal={The Astrophysical Journal Letters},
  year={2002},
  volume={581},
  pages={L115 - L118}
}

• G. Benedict, B. Mcarthur, +9 authors M. Mayor
• Published 25 November 2002
• Physics, Geology
• The Astrophysical Journal Letters

We report the first astrometrically determined mass of an extrasolar planet, a companion previously detected by Doppler spectroscopy. Radial velocities first provided an ephemeris with which to schedule a significant fraction of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations near companion peri- and apastron. The astrometry residuals at these orbital phases exhibit a systematic deviation consistent with a perturbation due to a planetary mass companion. Combining HST astrometry with radial velocities, we solve for the proper motion, parallax, perturbation size, inclination, and position angle of the line of nodes, while constraining period, velocity amplitude, longitude of periastron, and eccentricity to values determined from radial velocities. We find a perturbation semimajor axis and inclination, α = 0.25 ± 0.06 mas, i = 84° ± 6°, and Gl 876 absolute parallax, πabs = 214.6 ± 0.2 mas. Assuming that the mass of the primary star is M* = 0.32 M☉, we find the mass of the planet, Gl 876b, Mb = 1.89 ± 0.34 MJup.