Know the Planet, Know the Star: Precise Stellar Densities from Kepler Transit Light Curves

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how transit light curves from Kepler can precisely determine stellar densities, aiding in characterizing host stars of transiting exoplanets, especially for long-period or singly-transiting systems.

Contribution

It introduces a Bayesian method to measure stellar densities from transit light curves with high precision, validated against literature values.

Findings

Stellar densities measured within 5% for most stars.

95% of measurements agree within 3-sigma with literature.

Posterior distributions are publicly available online.

Abstract

The properties of a transiting planet's host star are written in its transit light curve. The light curve can reveal the stellar density and the limb darkening profile in addition to the characteristics of the planet and its orbit. For planets with strong prior constraints on orbital eccentricity, we may measure these stellar properties directly from the light curve; this method promises to aid greatly in the characterization of transiting planet host stars targeted by the upcoming NASA TESS mission and any long-period, singly-transiting planets discovered in the same systems. Using Bayesian inference, we fit a transit model, including a nonlinear limb darkening law, to 66 Kepler transiting planet hosts to measure their stellar properties. We present posterior distributions of stellar density, limb-darkening coefficients, and other system parameters for these stars. We measure densities to within 5% for the majority of our target stars, with the dominant precision-limiting factor being the signal-to-noise ratio of the transits. 95 % of our measured stellar densities are in 3-sigma or better agreement with previously published literature values. We make posterior distributions for all of our target KOIs available for online download.