Revised Radii of Kepler Stars and Planets Using Gaia Data Release 2

By T. Berger, D. Huber, E. Gaidos, J. V. van Saders. Astrophysical Journal, 2018

257 citations recorded by the source corpus.

One bottleneck for the exploitation of data from the Kepler mission for stellar astrophysics and exoplanet research has been the lack of precise radii and evolutionary states for most of the observed stars. We report revised radii of 177,911 Kepler stars derived by combining parallaxes from the Gaia Data Release 2 with the DR25 Kepler Stellar Properties Catalog. The median radius precision is ≈8%, a typical improvement by a factor of 4–5 over previous estimates for typical Kepler stars. We find that ≈67% (≈120,000) of all Kepler targets are main-sequence stars, ≈21% (≈37,000) are subgiants, and ≈12% (≈21,000) are red giants, demonstrating that subgiant contamination is less severe than some previous estimates and that Kepler targets are mostly main-sequence stars. Using the revised stellar radii, we recalculate the radii for 2123 confirmed and 1922 candidate exoplanets. We confirm the presence of a gap in the radius distribution of small, close-in planets, but find that the gap is mostly limited to incident fluxes >200 , and its location may be at a slightly larger radius (closer to ≈2 R⊕) when compared to previous results. Furthermore, we find several confirmed exoplanets occupying a previously described “hot super-Earth desert” at high irradiance, show the relation between a gas-giant planet’s radius and its incident flux, and establish a bona fide sample of eight confirmed planets and 30 planet candidates with < 2 R⊕ in circumstellar “habitable zones” (incident fluxes between 0.25 and 1.50 ). The results presented here demonstrate the potential for transformative characterization of stellar and exoplanet populations using Gaia data.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Computational Mechanics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b021a9a8a34203e4713fc01a7636b370309c29a2

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. D. Huber
2. M. Moe
3. J. V. van Saders
4. E. Gaidos
5. T. Berger
6. A. Kraus
7. C. Badenes
8. J. Tayar

In Computational Mechanics

1. D. Huber
2. E. Gaidos
3. A. Kraus

In Instrumentation

1. D. Huber
2. J. V. van Saders
3. E. Gaidos
4. J. Tayar
5. A. Kraus
6. M. Moe
7. T. Berger
8. K. Kratter

Citations in the corpus

• The Close Binary Fraction of Solar-type Stars Is Strongly Anticorrelated with Metallicity (2018, methodology): “Berger et al. (2018) recently utilized Gaia parallactic distances to measure the stellar radii of Kepler stars and found that ≈65%, 23%, and 12% are MS stars, subgiants, and giants, respectively.”
• A Guide to Realistic Uncertainties on the Fundamental Properties of Solar-type Exoplanet Host Stars (2020, background): “…and sub-Neptune sized planets was only recently quantified because the feature is narrow enough to only be visible in samples with careful spectroscopic (Fulton et al. 2017), asteroseismic (Van Eylen et al. 2018), or astrometric (Berger et al. 2018; Hardegree-Ullman et al. 2020) characterization.”
• The Gaia–Kepler Stellar Properties Catalog. I. Homogeneous Fundamental Properties for 186,301 Kepler Stars (2020, methodology): “Sample Selection To identify our sample, we use the same Gaia-Kepler cross-match detailed in Berger et al. (2018b), which included 195,710 stars.”
• The Gaia–Kepler Stellar Properties Catalog. II. Planet Radius Demographics as a Function of Stellar Mass and Age (2020, background): “Berger et al. (2018b) found 74 confirmed planets/planet candidates in the “desert” and suggested that some of these planets (1) may be the remnants of the photoevaporation of a giant planet’s envelope (Baraffe et al. 2005), (2) did not receive enough EUV flux to lose their low molecular weight…”