On the Anomalous Radii of the Transiting Extrasolar Planets

TL;DR

This paper systematically compares observed radii of 90 transiting giant exoplanets with model predictions, revealing a strong correlation between radius anomalies and planetary temperature, which constrains theories of planetary heating mechanisms.

Contribution

It introduces a polynomial fitting function for model radii and demonstrates a significant temperature dependence of radius anomalies, supporting magnetohydrodynamic heating models.

Findings

Model radii improve over null hypothesis

Radius anomalies correlate with effective temperature

Temperature dependence supports magnetic heating hypothesis

Abstract

We present a systematic evaluation of the agreement between the observed radii of 90 well-characterized transiting extrasolar giant planets and their corresponding model radii. Our model radii are drawn from previously published calculations of core-less giant planets that have attained their asymptotic radii, and which have been tabulated for a range of planet masses and equilibrium temperatures. (We report a two-dimensional polynomial fitting function that accurately represents the models). As expected, the model radii provide a statistically significant improvement over a null hypothesis that the sizes of giant planets are completely independent of mass and effective temperature. As is well known, however, fiducial models provide an insufficient explanation; the planetary radius anomalies are strongly correlated with planetary equilibrium temperature. We find that the radius anomalies have a best-fit dependence, ${\cal R}\propto T_{\rm eff}^{\alpha}$, with $\alpha=1.4\pm0.6$. Incorporating this relation into the model radii leads to substantially less scatter in the radius correlation. The extra temperature dependence represents an important constraint on theoretical models for Hot Jupiters. Using simple scaling arguments, we find support for the hypothesis of Batygin and Stevenson (2010) that this correlation can be attributed to a planetary heating mechanism that is mediated by magnetohydrodynamic coupling between the planetary magnetic field and near-surface flow that is accompanied by ohmic dissipation at adiabatic depth. Additionally, we find that the temperature dependence is likely too strong to admit kinetic heating as the primary source of anomalous energy generation within the majority of the observed transiting planets.