Kepler Planet Masses and Eccentricities from TTV Analysis

By S. Hadden, Y. Lithwick. 2016

175 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We conduct a uniform analysis of the transit timing variations (TTVs) of 145 planets from 55 Kepler multiplanet systems to infer planet masses and eccentricities. Eighty of these planets do not have previously reported mass and eccentricity measurements. We employ two complementary methods to fit TTVs: Markov chain Monte Carlo simulations based on N-body integration, and an analytic fitting approach. Mass measurements of 49 planets, including 12 without previously reported masses, meet our criterion for classification as robust. Using mass and radius measurements, we infer the masses of planets’ gaseous envelopes for both our TTV sample and transiting planets with radial velocity observations. Insight from analytic TTV formulae allows us to partially circumvent degeneracies inherent to inferring eccentricities from TTV observations. We find that planet eccentricities are generally small, typically a few percent, but in many instances are nonzero.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b7564d88930df0f2a1214cbcf1767df43662f9f4

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. Timothy Morton
2. B. Fulton
3. E. Petigura
4. J. Owen
5. Andrew W. Howard
6. S. Raymond
7. A. Morbidelli
8. J. Johnson

In Instrumentation

1. Timothy Morton
2. J. Owen
3. Andrew W. Howard
4. G. Marcy
5. E. Petigura
6. B. Fulton
7. J. Johnson
8. H. Isaacson

Citations in the corpus

• The California-Kepler Survey. IV. Metal-rich Stars Host a Greater Diversity of Planets (2017, background): “While a handful of Kepler planets have well-measured masses through RVs (e.g. Marcy et al. 2014) or TTVs (e.g. Hadden & Lithwick 2017), the vast majority of Kepler planets have unknown masses.”
• The California-Kepler Survey. III. A Gap in the Radius Distribution of Small Planets (2017, background): “In addition, detailed modeling of transit timing variations (TTVs) provided mass constraints for a large number of systems in specific architectures (e.g., Wu & Lithwick 2013; Hadden & Lithwick 2014, 2016).”
• Core-powered mass-loss and the radius distribution of small exoplanets (2017, background): “…transit radius with mass estimates from either radial velocity measurements or transit timing variations provides a handle on the density of some of these planets, indicating that many of them do not have a rocky composition (Weiss & Marcy 2014; Jontof-Hutter et al. 2016; Hadden & Lithwick 2017).”
• About 30% of Sun-like Stars Have Kepler-like Planetary Systems: A Study of Their Intrinsic Architecture (2018, methodology): “Although such a feature prevents from using TTV as a characterization technique to precisely constrain the mutual inclination values (e.g., Hadden & Lithwick 2017), it indeed helps to use TTV as a detection technique to probe planet with a broader range of inclination values than the transit…”
• Formation of planetary systems by pebble accretion and migration (2018, background): “Larger planets – above 2 RE and mass of about five Earth mass (ME) – are consistent with having primordial H/He envelopes that make up between 1 and 20% of the total mass (Hadden & Lithwick 2017).”