Accurate Empirical Radii and Masses of Planets and Their Host Stars with Gaia Parallaxes

By Keivan G. Stassun, K. Collins, B. University, Fisk University, O. University. 2016

351 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present empirical measurements of the radii of 116 stars that host transiting planets. These radii are determined using only direct observables—the bolometric flux at Earth, the effective temperature, and the parallax provided by the Gaia first data release—and thus are virtually model independent, with extinction being the only free parameter. We also determine each star’s mass using our newly determined radius and the stellar density, a virtually model independent quantity itself from previously published transit analyses. These stellar radii and masses are in turn used to redetermine the transiting-planet radii and masses, again using only direct observables. The median uncertainties on the stellar radii and masses are 8% and 30%, respectively, and the resulting uncertainties on the planet radii and masses are 9% and 22%, respectively. These accuracies are generally larger than previously published model-dependent precisions of 5% and 6% on the planet radii and masses, respectively, but the newly determined values are purely empirical. We additionally report radii for 242 stars hosting radial-velocity (non-transiting) planets, with a median achieved accuracy of ≈2%. Using our empirical stellar masses we verify that the majority of putative “retired A stars” in the sample are indeed more massive than ∼1.2 . Most importantly, the bolometric fluxes and angular radii reported here for a total of 498 planet host stars—with median accuracies of 1.7% and 1.8%, respectively—serve as a fundamental data set to permit the re-determination of transiting-planet radii and masses with the Gaia second data release to ≈3% and ≈5% accuracy, better than currently published precisions, and determined in an entirely empirical fashion.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b0f0293ad3acb7e228f9be990695d8deefb10217

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. D. Huber
2. Keivan G. Stassun
3. J. V. van Saders
4. J. Tayar
5. G. Torres
6. Z. Claytor
7. K. Covey
8. A. Burgasser

In Instrumentation

1. Keivan G. Stassun
2. D. Huber
3. J. V. van Saders
4. J. Tayar
5. G. Torres
6. Z. Claytor
7. A. Burgasser
8. K. Covey

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

1. Keivan G. Stassun
2. Z. Claytor
3. K. Covey
4. J. V. van Saders
5. D. Huber
6. A. Burgasser
7. G. Torres
8. J. Tayar

Citations in the corpus

• A Guide to Realistic Uncertainties on the Fundamental Properties of Solar-type Exoplanet Host Stars (2020, methodology): “Figure 1 illustrates the combined effects of these un- 3 certainties by comparing fbol estimates from SED fits for exoplanet host stars from Stassun et al. (2017), which are commonly adopted as default stellar properties on the NASA Exoplanet Archive, to independent fbol measurements using SED…”
• Evidence for a Systematic Offset of −80 μas in the Gaia DR2 Parallaxes (2018, methodology): “…to determine accurate radii and masses for tens of thousands of bright stars observed by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS; Ricker et al. 2015), by combining the Gaia parallaxes with the granulation “flicker” (Bastien et al. 2016) in the TESS light curves (Stassun et al. 2017, 2018).”
• The APOGEE-2 Survey of the Orion Star-forming Complex. II. Six-dimensional Structure (2018, methodology): “As demonstrated in Stassun et al. (2017), with this wavelength coverage for the constructed SEDs, the resulting Fbol are generally determined with an accuracy of a few percent.”