The distribution of planet sizes encodes details of planet formation and evolution. We present the most precise planet size distribution to date based on Gaia parallaxes, Kepler photometry, and ...spectroscopic temperatures from the California-Kepler Survey. Previously, we measured stellar radii to 11% precision using high-resolution spectroscopy; by adding Gaia astrometry, the errors are now 3%. Planet radius measurements are, in turn, improved to 5% precision. With a catalog of ∼1000 planets with precise properties, we probed in fine detail the gap in the planet size distribution that separates two classes of small planets, rocky super-Earths and gas-dominated sub-Neptunes. Our previous study and others suggested that the gap may be observationally under-resolved and inherently flat-bottomed, with a band of forbidden planet sizes. Analysis based on our new catalog refutes this; the gap is partially filled in. Two other important factors that sculpt the distribution are a planet's orbital distance and its host-star mass, both of which are related to a planet's X-ray/UV irradiation history. For lower-mass stars, the bimodal planet distribution shifts to smaller sizes, consistent with smaller stars producing smaller planet cores. Details of the size distribution including the extent of the "sub-Neptune desert" and the width and slope of the gap support the view that photoevaporation of low-density atmospheres is the dominant evolutionary determinant of the planet size distribution.
Recently, several groups have resolved a gap that bifurcates planets between the size of Earth and Neptune into two populations. The location and depth of this feature is an important signature of ...the physical processes that form and sculpt planets. In particular, planets residing in the radius gap are valuable probes of these processes as they may be undergoing the final stages of envelope loss. Here, we discuss two views of the radius gap by Fulton & Petigura (F18) and Van Eylen et al. (V18). In V18, the gap is wider and more devoid of planets. This is due, in part, to V18's more precise measurements of planet radius . Thanks to Gaia, uncertainties in stellar radii are no longer the limiting uncertainties in determining for the majority of Kepler planets; instead, errors in / dominate. V18's analysis incorporated short-cadence photometry along with constraints on mean stellar density that enabled more accurate determinations of / . In the F18 analysis, less accurate / blurs the boundary the radius gap. The differences in / are largest at high impact parameter ( ) and often exceed 10%. This motivates excluding high-b planets from demographic studies, but identifying such planets from long-cadence photometry alone is challenging. We show that transit duration can serve as an effective proxy, and we leverage this information to enhance the contrast between the super-Earth and sub-Neptune populations.
Classification of stars, by comparing their optical spectra to a few dozen spectral standards, has been a workhorse of observational astronomy for more than a century. Here, we extend this technique ...by compiling a library of optical spectra of 404 touchstone stars observed with Keck/HIRES by the California Planet Search. The spectra have high resolution (R 60,000), high signal-to-noise ratio (S/N 150/pixel), and are registered onto a common wavelength scale. The library stars have properties derived from interferometry, asteroseismology, LTE spectral synthesis, and spectrophotometry. To address a lack of well-characterized late-K dwarfs in the literature, we measure stellar radii and temperatures for 23 nearby K dwarfs, using modeling of the spectral energy distribution and Gaia parallaxes. This library represents a uniform data set spanning the spectral types ∼M5-F1 (Teff 3000-7000 K, R 0.1-16 R ). We also present "Empirical SpecMatch" (SpecMatch-Emp), a tool for parameterizing unknown spectra by comparing them against our spectral library. For FGKM stars, SpecMatch-Emp achieves accuracies of 100 K in effective temperature (Teff), 15% in stellar radius (R ), and 0.09 dex in metallicity (Fe/H). Because the code relies on empirical spectra it performs particularly well for stars ∼K4 and later, which are challenging to model with existing spectral synthesizers, reaching accuracies of 70 K in Teff, 10% in R , and 0.12 dex in Fe/H. We also validate the performance of SpecMatch-Emp, finding it to be robust at lower spectral resolution and S/N, enabling the characterization of faint late-type stars. Both the library and stellar characterization code are publicly available.
Determining whether Earth-like planets are common or rare looms as a touchstone in the question of life in the universe. We searched for Earth-size planets that cross in front of their host stars by ...examining the brightness measurements of 42,000 stars from National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Kepler mission. We found 603 planets, including 10 that are Earth size (1—2 R⊕) and receive comparable levels of stellar energy to that of Earth (0.25 — 4 F⊕). We account for Kepler's imperfect detectability of such planets by injecting synthetic planet—caused dimmings into the Kepler brightness measurements and recording the fraction detected. We find that 11 ± 4% of Sun-like stars harbor an Earth-size planet receiving between one and four times the stellar intensity as Earth. We also find that the occurrence of Earth-size planets is constant with increasing orbital period (P), within equal intervals of logP up to ∼200 d. Extrapolating, one finds $5.7^{+1.7}_{-2.2}\%$ of Sun-like stars harbor an Earth-size planet with orbital periods of 200—400 d.
RadVel: The Radial Velocity Modeling Toolkit Fulton, Benjamin J.; Petigura, Erik A.; Blunt, Sarah ...
Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific,
04/2018, Letnik:
130, Številka:
986
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
RadVel is an open-source Python package for modeling Keplerian orbits in radial velocity (RV) timeseries. RadVel provides a convenient framework to fit RVs using maximum a posteriori optimization and ...to compute robust confidence intervals by sampling the posterior probability density via Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). RadVel allows users to float or fix parameters, impose priors, and perform Bayesian model comparison. We have implemented real-time MCMC convergence tests to ensure adequate sampling of the posterior. RadVel can output a number of publication-quality plots and tables. Users may interface with RadVel through a convenient command-line interface or directly from Python. The code is object-oriented and thus naturally extensible. We encourage contributions from the community. Documentation is available at http://radvel.readthedocs.io.
Abstract We present ethraid , an open-source Python package designed to measure the mass ( m c ) and separation ( a ) of a bound companion from measurements covering a fraction of the orbital period. ...ethraid constrains m c and a by jointly modeling radial velocity, astrometric, and/or direct imaging data in a Bayesian framework. Partial orbit data sets, especially those with highly limited phase coverage, are represented well by a few method-specific summary statistics. By modeling these statistics rather than the original data, ethraid optimizes computational efficiency with minimal reduction in accuracy. ethraid uses importance sampling to efficiently explore the often broad posteriors that arise from partial orbits. The core computations of ethraid are implemented in Cython for speed. We validate ethraid 's performance by using it to constrain the masses and separations of the planetary companions to HD 117207 and TOI-1694. We designed ethraid to be both fast and simple, as well as to give broad, “quick look” constraints on companion parameters using minimal data. ethraid is pip installable and available on Zenodo and GitHub.
ABSTRACT We present astrophysical false positive probability calculations for every Kepler Object of Interest (KOI)-the first large-scale demonstration of a fully automated transiting planet ...validation procedure. Out of 7056 KOIs, we determine that 1935 have probabilities <1% of being astrophysical false positives, and thus may be considered validated planets. Of these, 1284 have not yet been validated or confirmed by other methods. In addition, we identify 428 KOIs that are likely to be false positives, but have not yet been identified as such, though some of these may be a result of unidentified transit timing variations. A side product of these calculations is full stellar property posterior samplings for every host star, modeled as single, binary, and triple systems. These calculations use vespa, a publicly available Python package that is able to be easily applied to any transiting exoplanet candidate.
Exoplanets orbiting pre-main-sequence stars are laboratories for studying planet evolution processes, including atmospheric loss, orbital migration, and radiative cooling. V1298 Tau, a young solar ...analog with an age of 23 4 Myr, is one such laboratory. The star is already known to host a Jupiter-sized planet on a 24 day orbit. Here, we report the discovery of three additional planets-all between the sizes of Neptune and Saturn-based on our analysis of K2 Campaign 4 photometry. Planets c and d have sizes of 5.6 and 6.4 , respectively, and with orbital periods of 8.25 and 12.40 days reside 0.25% outside of the nominal 3:2 mean-motion resonance. Planet e is 8.7 in size but only transited once in the K2 time series and thus has a period longer than 36 days, but likely shorter than 223 days. The V1298 Tau system may be a precursor to the compact multiplanet systems found to be common by the Kepler mission. However, the large planet sizes stand in sharp contrast to the vast majority of Kepler multiplanet systems, which have planets smaller than 3 . Simple dynamical arguments suggest total masses of <28 and <120 for the c-d and d-b planet pairs, respectively. The implied low masses suggest that the planets may still be radiatively cooling and contracting, and perhaps losing atmosphere. The V1298 Tau system offers rich prospects for further follow-up including atmospheric characterization by transmission or eclipse spectroscopy, dynamical characterization through transit-timing variations, and measurements of planet masses and obliquities by radial velocities.
Kepler planets around a given star have similar sizes to each other and regular orbital spacing, like "peas in a pod." Several studies have tested whether detection bias could produce this apparent ...pattern by resampling planet radii at random and applying a sensitivity function analogous to that of the Kepler spacecraft. However, Zhu argues that this pattern is not astrophysical but an artifact of Kepler's discovery efficiency at the detection threshold. To support this claim, their new analysis samples the transit signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) to derive a synthetic population of bootstrapped planet radii. Here, we examine the procedure of sampling transit S/N and demonstrate it is not applicable. Sampling transit S/N does not set up random, independent planet radii, and so it is unsuitable for corroborating (or falsifying) detection bias as the origin of apparent patterns in planet radius. By sampling the planet radii directly and using a simple model for Kepler's sensitivity, we rule out detection bias as the source of the peas-in-a-pod pattern with >10 confidence.
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.
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