Hot Jupiter
The Kepler spacecraft is a NASA telescope equipped with photometric equipment. Launched in 2009, Kepler continuously watches 156,000 stars in a small area. A team of astronomers, hoping to learn more about hot jupiter planets and brown dwarfs, selected four F-type stars from the Kepler Input Catalog flagged as host to a Kepler Object of Interest (a transiting object that could possibly be a planet). Using three quarters of Kepler's data, the science team conducted a follow-up investigation in using the SOPHIE échelle spectrograph at the Haute-Provence Observatory in southern France, observing stars Kepler-40, Kepler-39, KOI-552 and KOI-410. Of these, conclusive evidence of a planet orbiting KOI-410 could not be found, and KOI-552 was found to be a binary star with an M-type companion. The Hot Jupiter KOI-428b was the first of these four to be confirmed.