Using Stellar Densities to Evaluate Transiting Exoplanetary Candidates

TL;DR

This paper investigates using independently derived stellar densities from high-precision space photometry to efficiently identify promising transiting exoplanet candidates, reducing false positives and follow-up efforts.

Contribution

It extends the use of stellar density estimates from space-based photometry to improve candidate vetting in exoplanet searches, leveraging asteroseismic data.

Findings

High-precision photometry enables accurate stellar density measurements.

Stellar densities help distinguish true exoplanets from false positives.

The approach reduces follow-up observational load.

Abstract

One of the persistent complications in searches for transiting exoplanets is the low percentage of the detected candidates that ultimately prove to be planets, which significantly increases the load on the telescopes used for the follow-up observations to confirm or reject candidates. Several attempts have been made at creating techniques that can pare down candidate lists without the need of additional observations. Some of these techniques involve a detailed analysis of light curve characteristics; others estimate the stellar density or some proxy thereof. In this paper, we extend upon this second approach, exploring the use of independently-calculated stellar densities to identify the most promising transiting exoplanet candidates. We use a set of CoRoT candidates and the set of known transiting exoplanets to examine the potential of this approach. In particular, we note the possibilities inherent in the high-precision photometry from space missions, which can detect stellar asteroseismic pulsations from which accurate stellar densities can be extracted without additional observations.