Talk:Kepler-70b

Minimum mass
In this page, the planet's minimum mass is 4.45 M⊕ yet in KOI-55's page it's 0.440 M⊕. Which one of them is true? --Artman40 (talk) 23:07, 30 March 2013 (UTC)
 * This page is right, KOI-55 is in error. Nature and the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia conflict on this, so I don't know which value to go with. Wer900 • talk 23:52, 30 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Should we tag the articles for factual inaccuracy until it's been figured out which one is the right mass? --Artman40 (talk) 06:09, 31 March 2013 (UTC)
 * IMO, we should just consider the Nature values to be true. Larger indices do make mistakes at times. Wer900 • talk 17:57, 31 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Kepler page gave this planet the mass 0.440 M⊕ as well. --Artman40 (talk) 14:08, 3 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Since Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia references Nature for its value, it's obviously a typo on their part (presumably copied by the HEC reference given in the article). So we should certainly go with Nature's and Kepler's value, IMO (and thus also remove the dubious "record density"). --Roentgenium111 (talk) 17:41, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

Stellar flux
How to calculate how much starlight the planet receives from very close stars? If calculating with the classic formula, Kepler-70b should receive over 600000 times the starlight per square meter than Earth does. --Artman40 (talk) 14:55, 29 June 2013 (UTC)
 * 640000 / 1366 = 468.5% of Earth's Irradiance. 209.202.26.125 (talk) 22:51, 27 November 2015 (UTC)

Solid surface at >7000 K?
According to the given values for mass, size and density of this planet, it must be a solid planet. But how is it possible that a planet stays solid at a temperature of 7000 K? At standard pressure, there is no material which is solid at that temperature.

...But on the other hand, if this planet was in a process of vaporization, the vaporized material would form a thick envelope around the planet before leaving its influence of gravity (similar to the coma of a comet, but much denser due to the higher gravity of the core). And with such a gas-planet-like envelope, the observed diameter would be higher and the density much lower. So most of the planet must really be in solid state, perhaps except a thin atmosphere.

Can a thin atmosphere of vapor keep the planet's surface far below these temperatures so it stays solid? That sounds improbable to me, but it's the best explanation I have... --79.243.252.178 (talk) 22:34, 9 February 2014 (UTC)


 * It is not possible for (any) planet to stay solid at 7000K. As you noted there is no material which is solid at that temperature, and as such even if they had a pure iron composition they would be gaseous, and substantially larger in radius for their proposed mass.  This is just one of the reasons why the existence of this planet (and Kepler-70c) is highly disputed in the astronomical community. Physdragon (talk) 21:14, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

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A Commons file used on this page has been nominated for speedy deletion
The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page has been nominated for speedy deletion: You can see the reason for deletion at the file description page linked above. —Community Tech bot (talk) 23:51, 17 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Kepler-70b scorched.jpg

More recent published research (2015 and 2019) casts doubt on this planet's existence
The 2015 paper "Planetary candidates around the pulsating sdB star KIC 5807616 considered doubtful" and the 2019 paper "Analysis of putative exoplanetary signatures found in light curves of two sdBV stars observed by Kepler" (published in Astronomy and Astrophysics) cast doubt on the existence of the Kepler-70 exoplanets. The authors of the latter paper state (among other things):

"we performed this test on the F 1 and F 2 sig- nals that were observed in KIC 5807616 sdBV. Both signals have larger frequency variations than expected from the exoplanetary origin. After a careful study, we classified the F 1 and F 2 fre- quencies as resulting from a beating of intermediate-amplitude pulsating g modes."

I would like to edit this page (and the Kepler-70/70c/Subdwarf-B pages) to cite these papers and to add a note saying something like "Recent research has suggested that the Kepler-70 exoplanets may not exist, and that the apparent variations in brightness can be explained through other means".

I'm not a professional astronomer and don't know if counter-arguments to those in the papers exist, so I thought I'd post on the talk pages first and see what other editors thought. However, after looking things up further, authors including Ulrich Heber have cited the 2015 paper in their work and appear to find its arguments convincing, so I'm planning on making the edit anyway. I'm still posting on the talk page, though, as "By the way, this planet may not exist" is a very major claim to add to an article about it!

(I'm posting near-identical messages to this one on the other three relevant talk pages. I hope it doesn't trigger any sort of automated spam-detection.)

Someone else pointed me to the 2019 paper during a Stack Exchange discussion; I don't normally keep up with this research, and hadn't known about the 2015 paper until today either.

AstridRedfern (talk) 11:55, 26 January 2020 (UTC)


 * The second paper is also freely available on the arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.03321 Fdfexoex (talk) 15:15, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

Pre-subdwarf mass of the star
Since mid-2016, the article has stated

"These statistics were very likely higher than what they were today when it was a red giant, the estimated mass of Kepler-70 before it became a subdwarf, would probably have been around 0.89–0.95 M☉."

I recently added a "citation needed", and tried to message the editor who added that statement. (Hopefully I've done that correctly via that editor's talk page.) However, I thought it would be worth investigating this myself.

Although I haven't yet found a mass range for the red giant phase, for the main sequence star we have a lower bound of roughly 0.5 solar masses, since the star was large enough to start fusing helium. My source for that is:

Laughlin, G., Bodenheimer, P., & Adams, F. C. (1997). The end of the main sequence. The Astrophysical Journal, 482(1), 420.

And since this is a subdwarf, helium fusion would have started with a helium flash, giving the main sequence star an upper bound of 2 solar masses. Source:

Harpaz, A. (1993). Stellar evolution. AK Peters/CRC Press.

I'm holding off on editing these into the article for now, partly to give the editor I mentioned time to get back to me, partly to see if anyone can supply tighter bounds from suitably citable sources. This may be tricky - I've seen my second source above cited by one page in support of a 1.8 solar mass upper limit, even though the source itself explicitly states 2.0 solar masses!

AstridRedfern (talk) 21:58, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Delete the image?
I have considered deleting the image on the infobox because the color of the star is wrong. It should be blue, not yellow; this can be misleading for non-astronomers visiting this page. Could this be a possibility in the near future? 2003 LN6 (talk) 17:53, 5 November 2023 (UTC)