We present time series measurements of chromospheric activity for more than 2600 main-sequence and subgiant stars on the California Planet Search (CPS) program with spectral types ranging from about ...F5V to M4V for main-sequence stars and from G0IV to about K5IV for subgiants. The large data set of more than 44,000 spectra allows us to identify an empirical baseline floor for chromospheric activity as a function of color and height above the main sequence. We define Delta *DS as an excess in emission in the Ca II H and K lines above the baseline activity floor and define radial velocity jitter as a function of Delta *DS and B -- V for main-sequence and subgiant stars. Although the jitter for any individual star can always exceed the baseline level, we find that K dwarfs have the lowest level of jitter. The lack of correlation between observed jitter and chromospheric activity in K dwarfs suggests that the observed jitter is dominated by instrumental or analysis errors and not astrophysical noise sources. Thus, given the long-term precision for the CPS program, radial velocities are not correlated with astrophysical noise for chromospherically quiet K dwarf stars, making these stars particularly well suited for the highest precision Doppler surveys. Chromospherically quiet F and G dwarfs and subgiants exhibit higher baseline levels of astrophysical jitter than K dwarfs. Despite the fact that the rms in Doppler velocities is correlated with the mean chromospheric activity, it is rare to see one-to-one correlations between the individual time series activity and Doppler measurements, diminishing the prospects for correcting activity-induced velocity variations in F and G dwarfs.
Abstract
We have established precise planet radii, semimajor axes, incident stellar fluxes, and stellar masses for 909 planets in 355 multi-planet systems discovered by
Kepler
. In this sample, we ...find that planets within a single multi-planet system have correlated sizes: each planet is more likely to be the size of its neighbor than a size drawn at random from the distribution of observed planet sizes. In systems with three or more planets, the planets tend to have a regular spacing: the orbital period ratios of adjacent pairs of planets are correlated. Furthermore, the orbital period ratios are smaller in systems with smaller planets, suggesting that the patterns in planet sizes and spacing are linked through formation and/or subsequent orbital dynamics. Yet, we find that essentially no planets have orbital period ratios smaller than 1.2, regardless of planet size. Using empirical mass–radius relationships, we estimate the mutual Hill separations of planet pairs. We find that 93% of the planet pairs are at least 10 mutual Hill radii apart, and that a spacing of ∼20 mutual Hill radii is most common. We also find that when comparing planet sizes, the outer planet is larger in 65% ± 0.4% of cases, and the typical ratio of the outer to inner planet size is positively correlated with the temperature difference between the planets. This could be the result of photo-evaporation.
Abstract
We present a high-precision radial velocity (RV) survey of 719 FGKM stars, which host 164 known exoplanets and 14 newly discovered or revised exoplanets and substellar companions. This ...catalog updated the orbital parameters of known exoplanets and long-period candidates, some of which have decades-longer observational baselines than they did upon initial detection. The newly discovered exoplanets range from warm sub-Neptunes and super-Earths to cold gas giants. We present the catalog sample selection criteria, as well as over 100,000 RV measurements, which come from the Keck-HIRES, APF-Levy, and Lick-Hamilton spectrographs. We introduce the new RV search pipeline
RVSearch
(
https://california-planet-search.github.io/rvsearch/
) that we used to generate our planet catalog, and we make it available to the public as an open-source Python package. This paper is the first study in a planned series that will measure exoplanet occurrence rates and compare exoplanet populations, including studies of giant planet occurrence beyond the water ice line, and eccentricity distributions to explore giant planet formation pathways. We have made public all radial velocities and associated data that we use in this catalog.
Abstract
The size of a planet is an observable property directly connected to the physics of its formation and evolution. We used precise radius measurements from the California-
Kepler
Survey to ...study the size distribution of 2025
Kepler
planets in fine detail. We detect a factor of ≥2 deficit in the occurrence rate distribution at 1.5–2.0
. This gap splits the population of close-in (
P
< 100 days) small planets into two size regimes:
and
, with few planets in between. Planets in these two regimes have nearly the same intrinsic frequency based on occurrence measurements that account for planet detection efficiencies. The paucity of planets between 1.5 and 2.0
supports the emerging picture that close-in planets smaller than Neptune are composed of rocky cores measuring 1.5
or smaller with varying amounts of low-density gas that determine their total sizes.
Probing the connection between a star's metallicity and the presence and properties of any associated planets offers an observational link between conditions during the epoch of planet formation and ...mature planetary systems. We explore this connection by analyzing the metallicities of Kepler target stars and the subset of stars found to host transiting planets. After correcting for survey incompleteness, we measure planet occurrence: the number of planets per 100 stars with a given metallicity M. Planet occurrence correlates with metallicity for some, but not all, planet sizes and orbital periods. For warm super-Earths having P = 10-100 days and = 1.0-1.7 , planet occurrence is nearly constant over metallicities spanning −0.4 to +0.4 dex. We find 20 warm super-Earths per 100 stars, regardless of metallicity. In contrast, the occurrence of warm sub-Neptunes ( = 1.7-4.0 ) doubles over that same metallicity interval, from 20 to 40 planets per 100 stars. We model the distribution of planets as , where β characterizes the strength of any metallicity correlation. This correlation steepens with decreasing orbital period and increasing planet size. For warm super-Earths β = , while for hot Jupiters β = . High metallicities in protoplanetary disks may increase the mass of the largest rocky cores or the speed at which they are assembled, enhancing the production of planets larger than 1.7 . The association between high metallicity and short-period planets may reflect disk density profiles that facilitate the inward migration of solids or higher rates of planet-planet scattering.
The Upper Scorpius OB association is the nearest region of recent massive star formation and thus an important benchmark for investigations concerning stellar evolution and planet formation ...timescales. We present nine eclipsing binaries (EBs) in Upper Scorpius, three of which are newly reported here and all of which were discovered from K2 photometry. Joint fitting of the eclipse photometry and radial velocities from newly acquired Keck I/HIRES spectra yields precise masses and radii for those systems that are spectroscopically double-lined. The binary orbital periods in our sample range from 0.6 to 100 days, with total masses ranging from 0.2 to 8 M . At least 33% of the EBs reside in hierarchical multiples, including two triples and one quadruple. We use these EBs to develop an empirical mass-radius relation for pre-main-sequence stars and evaluate the predictions of widely used stellar evolutionary models. We report evidence for an age of 5-7 Myr, which is self-consistent in the mass range of 0.3-5 M and based on the fundamentally determined masses and radii of EBs. Evolutionary models including the effects of magnetic fields imply an age of 9-10 Myr. Our results are consistent with previous studies that indicate that many models systematically underestimate the masses of low-mass stars by 20%-60% based on Hertzsprung-Russell diagram analyses. We also consider the dynamical states of several binaries and compare with expectations from tidal dissipation theories. Finally, we identify RIK 72 b as a long-period transiting brown dwarf (M = 59.2 6.8 MJup, R = 3.10 0.31 RJup, P 97.8 days) and an ideal benchmark for brown dwarf cooling models at 5-10 Myr.
We report the detection of V1298 Tau b, a warm Jupiter-sized planet (RP = 0.91 0.05 RJup, P = 24.1 days) transiting a young solar analog with an estimated age of 23 Myr. The star and its planet ...belong to Group 29, a young association in the foreground of the Taurus-Auriga star-forming region. While hot Jupiters have been previously reported around young stars, those planets are non-transiting and near-term atmospheric characterization is not feasible. The V1298 Tau system is a compelling target for follow-up study through transmission spectroscopy and Doppler tomography owing to the transit depth (0.5%), host star brightness (Ks = 8.1 mag), and rapid stellar rotation ( = 23 km s−1). Although the planet is Jupiter-sized, its mass is currently unknown due to high-amplitude radial velocity jitter. Nevertheless, V1298 Tau b may help constrain formation scenarios for at least one class of close-in exoplanets, providing a window into the nascent evolution of planetary interiors and atmospheres.
The determination of exoplanet properties and occurrence rates using Kepler data critically depends on our knowledge of the fundamental properties (such as temperature, radius, and mass) of the ...observed stars. We present revised stellar properties for 197,096 Kepler targets observed between Quarters 1-17 (Q1-17), which were used for the final transiting planet search run by the Kepler Mission (Data Release 25, DR25). Similar to the Q1-16 catalog by Huber et al., the classifications are based on conditioning published atmospheric parameters on a grid of Dartmouth isochrones, with significant improvements in the adopted method and over 29,000 new sources for temperatures, surface gravities, or metallicities. In addition to fundamental stellar properties, the new catalog also includes distances and extinctions, and we provide posterior samples for each stellar parameter of each star. Typical uncertainties are ∼27% in radius, ∼17% in mass, and ∼51% in density, which is somewhat smaller than previous catalogs because of the larger number of improved constraints and the inclusion of isochrone weighting when deriving stellar posterior distributions. On average, the catalog includes a significantly larger number of evolved solar-type stars, with an increase of 43.5% in the number of subgiants. We discuss the overall changes of radii and masses of Kepler targets as a function of spectral type, with a particular focus on exoplanet host stars.
Abstract
The California-
Kepler
Survey (CKS) is an observational program developed to improve our knowledge of the properties of stars found to host transiting planets by NASA’s
Kepler
Mission. The ...improvement stems from new high-resolution optical spectra obtained using HIRES at the W. M. Keck Observatory. The CKS stellar sample comprises 1305 stars classified as
Kepler
objects of interest, hosting a total of 2075 transiting planets. The primary sample is magnitude-limited (
) and contains 960 stars with 1385 planets. The sample was extended to include some fainter stars that host multiple planets, ultra-short period planets, or habitable zone planets. The spectroscopic parameters were determined with two different codes, one based on template matching and the other on direct spectral synthesis using radiative transfer. We demonstrate a precision of 60 K in
, 0.10 dex in
, 0.04 dex in
, and 1.0
in
. In this paper, we describe the CKS project and present a uniform catalog of spectroscopic parameters. Subsequent papers in this series present catalogs of derived stellar properties such as mass, radius, and age; revised planet properties; and statistical explorations of the ensemble. CKS is the largest survey to determine the properties of
Kepler
stars using a uniform set of high-resolution, high signal-to-noise ratio spectra. The HIRES spectra are available to the community for independent analyses.
Surveys have revealed many multi-planet systems containing super-Earths and Neptunes in orbits of a few days to a few months. There is debate whether in situ assembly or inward migration is the ...dominant mechanism of the formation of such planetary systems. Simulations suggest that migration creates tightly packed systems with planets whose orbital periods may be expressed as ratios of small integers (resonances), often in a many-planet series (chain). In the hundreds of multi-planet systems of sub-Neptunes, more planet pairs are observed near resonances than would generally be expected, but no individual system has hitherto been identified that must have been formed by migration. Proximity to resonance enables the detection of planets perturbing each other. Here we report transit timing variations of the four planets in the Kepler-223 system, model these variations as resonant-angle librations, and compute the long-term stability of the resonant chain. The architecture of Kepler-223 is too finely tuned to have been formed by scattering, and our numerical simulations demonstrate that its properties are natural outcomes of the migration hypothesis. Similar systems could be destabilized by any of several mechanisms, contributing to the observed orbital-period distribution, where many planets are not in resonances. Planetesimal interactions in particular are thought to be responsible for establishing the current orbits of the four giant planets in the Solar System by disrupting a theoretical initial resonant chain similar to that observed in Kepler-223.
Full text
Available for:
IJS, KISLJ, NUK, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK