Multi-object spectroscopy of stars in the CoRoT fields II: The stellar population of the CoRoT fields IRa01, LRa01, LRa02, and LRa06

TL;DR

This study characterizes the stellar populations in CoRoT fields using spectral data, revealing the distribution of spectral types and explaining the observed exoplanet host star types, supporting transit surveys for planet frequency analysis.

Contribution

It provides a detailed spectral type distribution of stars in CoRoT fields and explains the apparent bias in detected exoplanet host stars based on stellar population.

Findings

34.8% of stars are F-dwarfs

15.1% are G-dwarfs

5.0% are K-dwarfs in the observed fields

Abstract

With now more than 20 exoplanets discovered by CoRoT, it has often been considered strange that so many of them are orbiting F-stars, and so few of them K or M-stars. Although transit search programs are mostly sensitive to short-period planets, they are ideal for verifying these results. To determine the frequency of planets as a function of stellar mass, we also have to characterize the sample of stars that was observed. We study the stellar content of the CoRoT-fields IRa01, LRa01 (=LRa06), and LRa02 by determining the spectral types of 11466 stars. We used spectra obtained with the multi-object spectrograph AAOmega and derived the spectral types by using template spectra with well-known parameters. We find that 34.8+/-0.7% of the stars observed by CoRoT in these fields are F-dwarfs, 15.1+/-0.5% G-dwarfs, and 5.0+/-0.3% K-dwarfs. We conclude that the apparent lack of exoplanets of K- and M-stars is explained by the relatively small number of these stars in the observed sample. We also show that the apparently large number of planets orbiting F-stars is similarly explained by the large number of such stars in these fields. Our study also shows that the difference between the sample of stars that CoRoT observes and a sample of randomly selected stars is relatively small, and that the yield of CoRoT specifically is the detection one hot Jupiter amongst 2100+/-700 stars. We conclude that transit search programs can be used to study the relation between the frequency of planets and the mass of the host stars, and that the results obtained so far generally agree with those of radial velocity programs.