THE OCCURRENCE RATE OF SMALL PLANETS AROUND SMALL STARS

By C. Dressing, D. Charbonneau. 2013

530 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use the optical and near-infrared photometry from the Kepler Input Catalog to provide improved estimates of the stellar characteristics of the smallest stars in the Kepler target list. We find 3897 dwarfs with temperatures below 4000 K, including 64 planet candidate host stars orbited by 95 transiting planet candidates. We refit the transit events in the Kepler light curves for these planet candidates and combine the revised planet/star radius ratios with our improved stellar radii to revise the radii of the planet candidates orbiting the cool target stars. We then compare the number of observed planet candidates to the number of stars around which such planets could have been detected in order to estimate the planet occurrence rate around cool stars. We find that the occurrence rate of 0.5–4 R⊕ planets with orbital periods shorter than 50 days is planets per star. The occurrence rate of Earth-size (0.5–1.4 R⊕) planets is constant across the temperature range of our sample at Earth-size planets per star, but the occurrence of 1.4–4 R⊕ planets decreases significantly at cooler temperatures. Our sample includes two Earth-size planet candidates in the habitable zone, allowing us to estimate that the mean number of Earth-size planets in the habitable zone is planets per cool star. Our 95% confidence lower limit on the occurrence rate of Earth-size planets in the habitable zones of cool stars is 0.04 planets per star. With 95% confidence, the nearest transiting Earth-size planet in the habitable zone of a cool star is within 21 pc. Moreover, the nearest non-transiting planet in the habitable zone is within 5 pc with 95% confidence.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Education, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a9e238e11a5c47a12f36167756d05232c7dfac39

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Citations in the corpus

Revised Stellar Properties of Kepler Targets for the Q1-17 (DR25) Transit Detection Run (2016, background): “3) KIC 8733898 (KOI-2842, Kepler-446), with Teff ∼3500K and RQ1−17/Rnew ∼ 1.4, had its input values changed from Dressing & Charbonneau (2013) to Muirhead et al. (2015), leading to a smaller radius.”
A Technique for Extracting Highly Precise Photometry for the Two-Wheeled Kepler Mission (2014, background): “…analyses of the frequency of exoplanets around solar mass stars (Howard et al. 2012; Youdin 2011; Fressin et al. 2013), around cool stars (Swift et al. 2013; Morton & Swift 2014), and in their stars’ habitable zones (Dressing & Charbonneau 2013; Petigura et al. 2013; Foreman-Mackey et al. 2014).”
ROTATION PERIODS OF 34,030 KEPLER MAIN-SEQUENCE STARS: THE FULL AUTOCORRELATION SAMPLE (2014, methodology): “Slight differences in the distribution below ∼ 4000K, most notably the vertical artifacts and lower Teff range, occur as a result of our use of the Dressing & Charbonneau (2013) parameters in place of the KIC values, where available.”
ECCENTRICITY FROM TRANSIT PHOTOMETRY: SMALL PLANETS IN KEPLER MULTI-PLANET SYSTEMS HAVE LOW ECCENTRICITIES (2015, background): “This can significantly change the planet occurrence estimate, e.g. the number of planets smaller than 4 R⊕ around cool stars is estimated to 3% precision before the effect of eccentricity is taken into account (Dressing & Charbonneau 2013).”
THE IMPACT OF STELLAR MULTIPLICITY ON PLANETARY SYSTEMS. I. THE RUINOUS INFLUENCE OF CLOSE BINARY COMPANIONS (2016, background): “The emerging consensus is that planetary systems are ubiquitious (Dressing & Charbonneau 2013; Petigura et al. 2013; Foreman-Mackey et al. 2014; Muirhead et al. 2015), occurring with a frequency near unity across a wide range of stellar masses.”
PLANETARY CANDIDATES OBSERVED BY KEPLER IV: PLANET SAMPLE FROM Q1–Q8 (22 MONTHS) (2013, background): “…population in the Galaxy can be determined from the observed planet candidate sample from Kepler using a thorough understanding of the selection effects and sources of contamination (e.g., Youdin 2011; Howard et al. 2012; Fressin et al. 2013; Christiansen et al. 2013; Dressing & Charbonneau 2013).”
How to Characterize Habitable Worlds and Signs of Life (2017, background): “Such measurement uncertainties influence the calculated incident stellar irradiance of exoplanets and whether a certain planet is considered to orbit within the star’s HZ (see, e.g., Kaltenegger & Sasselov 2011, Von Braun et al. 2011, Boyajian et al. 2012, Dressing & Charbonneau 2013, Gaidos 2013).”
Identifying Exoplanets with Deep Learning: A Five-planet Resonant Chain around Kepler-80 and an Eighth Planet around Kepler-90 (2017, background): “As the Kepler mission matured and the list of planet candidates grew, the focus of the community shifted towards population-level studies (Fressin et al. 2013; Petigura et al. 2013a,b; Foreman-Mackey et al. 2014; Dressing & Charbonneau 2013, 2015; Burke et al. 2015; Mulders et al. 2015a,b).”
A STEEPER THAN LINEAR DISK MASS–STELLAR MASS SCALING RELATION (2016, background): “…et al. 2013), although no correlation is present for the population of hot Jupiters within a 10-day period (Obermeier et al. 2016); and (ii) a larger occurrence rate of close-in Earth-sized planets around M dwarfs than around Sun-like stars (Dressing & Charbonneau 2013; Mulders et al. 2015a).”
SOAR TESS Survey. I. Sculpting of TESS Planetary Systems by Stellar Companions (2019, background): “Also, as shown in Section 4.2.3, the widest binaries typically host Jupiter-sized planets, which are inherently rare around M dwarfs (Dressing & Charbonneau 2013).”
The Occurrence and Architecture of Exoplanetary Systems (2014, background): “Likewise, Dressing & Charbonneau (2013) and Kopparapu (2013) used the same probability density to derive occurrence rates differing by a factor of three.”
FALSE POSITIVE PROBABILITIES FOR ALL KEPLER OBJECTS OF INTEREST: 1284 NEWLY VALIDATED PLANETS AND 428 LIKELY FALSE POSITIVES (2016, background): “As we allow for a maximum extinction up to the measured AV extinction at infinity, not explicitly tied to distance, this typically allows for slightly hotter stars with slightly more extinction than was permitted by Dressing & Charbonneau (2013).”
PLANETS AROUND LOW-MASS STARS (PALMS). IV. THE OUTER ARCHITECTURE OF M DWARF PLANETARY SYSTEMS (2014, background): “In particular, Swift et al. (2013) and Dressing & Charbonneau (2013) find that the average rate of small planets from Kepler is about one per star for periods shorter than 50 days, implying a vast galaxy-wide presence of rocky planets (Morton & Swift 2014).”
HOW TO CONSTRAIN YOUR M DWARF: MEASURING EFFECTIVE TEMPERATURE, BOLOMETRIC LUMINOSITY, MASS, AND RADIUS (2015, methodology): “Parameters of M dwarfs can be estimated by direct comparison with model predictions (e.g., Casagrande et al. 2008; Gaidos 2013; Dressing & Charbonneau 2013).”
Observations of Transiting Exoplanets with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) (2014, methodology): “Results from Kepler suggest that such planets are very common (Petigura et al. 2013a; Dressing & Charbonneau 2013), especially around late K 2014 PASP, 126:1134–1173 and early M stars.”
They are small worlds after all: revised properties of Kepler M dwarf stars and their planets (2015, methodology): “Of our 4218 dwarf stars, 1436 are not in the Dressing & Charbonneau (2013) catalog; 810 of these were observed for a single quarter, mostly in Q17, and 1117 of them were observed for fewer than 5 quarters.”