A planet in a polar orbit of 1.4 solar-mass star

¹ Thüringer Landessternwarte Tautenburg, Sternwarte 5, D-07778 Tautenburg, Germany
² INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Bologna, Via Ranzani 1, I-40127 Bologna, Italy
³ Dpto. de Astrofísica, Universidad de La Laguna, E-38206 La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain
⁴ Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, E-38205 La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain
⁵ Zentrum für Astronomie Heidelberg,, Landessternwarte Heidelberg-Königstuhl 12 D-69117 Heidelberg Germany
⁶ European Southern Observatory, Karl-Schwarzschild-Str. 2, D-85748, Garching, Germany
⁷ Rheinisches Institut für Umweltforschung an der Universiät zu Köln, Aachener Straße 209, D-50931 Köln, Germany
⁸ Dr. Karl Remeis-Observatory & ECAP, Astronomical Institute, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Sternwartstr. 7, D-96049, Bamberg, Germany
⁹ School of Physics and Astronomy, Raymond and Beverly Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
¹⁰ Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie, Königstuhl 17, D-69117 Heidelberg, Germany
¹¹ Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astronomy, 60 Garden St., MA-02138 Cambridge, USA

^a e-mail: guenther@tls-tautenburg.de

Published online: 23 September 2015

Abstract

Although more than a thousand transiting extrasolar planets have been discovered, only very few of them orbit stars that are more massive than the Sun. The discovery of such planets is interesting, because they have formed in disks that are more massive but had a shorter life time than those of solar-like stars. Studies of planets more massive than the Sun thus tell us how the properties of the proto-planetary disks effect the formation of planets. Another aspect that makes these planets interesting is that they have kept their original orbital inclinations. By studying them we can thus find out whether the orbital axes planets are initially aligned to the stars rotational axes, or not. Here we report on the discovery of a planet of a 1.4 solar-mass star with a period of 5.6 days in a polar orbit made by CoRoT. This new planet thus is one of the few known close-in planets orbiting a star that is substantially more massive than the Sun.