arXiv Analytics

Sign in

arXiv:1712.04454 [astro-ph.EP]AbstractReferencesReviewsResources

Robo-AO Kepler Survey IV: the effect of nearby stars on 3857 planetary candidate systems

Carl Ziegler, Nicholas M. Law, Christoph Baranec, Reed Riddle, Dmitry A. Duev, Ward Howard, Rebecca Jensen-Clem, S. R. Kulkarni, Maïssa Salama

Published 2017-12-12Version 1

We present the overall statistical results from the Robo-AO Kepler planetary candidate survey, comprising of 3857 observations with 0.1"-resolution of planetary candidate systems with Robo-AO, an automated laser adaptive optics system. These observations reveal previously unknown nearby stars blended with the planetary candidate host star which alter the derived planetary radii or may be the source of an astrophysical false positive transit signal. In the first three papers in the survey, we detected 440 nearby stars around 3313 planetary candidate host stars. In this paper, we present observations of 532 planetary candidate host stars, detecting 94 companions around 88 stars; 84 of these companions have not previously been observed in high-resolution. We also report 50 more-widely-separated companions near 715 targets previously observed by Robo-AO. We derive corrected planetary radius estimates for the 814 planetary candidates in systems with a detected nearby star. If planetary candidates are equally likely to orbit the primary or secondary star, the radius estimates for planetary candidates in systems with likely bound nearby stars increase by a factor of 1.54, on average. We find that 35 previously-believed rocky planet candidates are likely not rocky due to the presence of nearby stars. From the combined datasets from the complete Robo-AO KOI survey, we find that 14.5\pm0.5% of planetary candidate hosts have a nearby star with 4", while 1.2% have two nearby stars and 0.08% have three. We find that 16% of Earth-sized, 13% of Neptune-sized, 14% of Saturn-sized, and 19% of Jupiter-sized planet candidates have stars close enough to affect their radius estimates.

Related articles: Most relevant | Search more
arXiv:1806.10142 [astro-ph.EP] (Published 2018-06-26)
Measuring the Recoverability of Close Binaries in Gaia DR2 with the Robo-AO Kepler Survey
Carl Ziegler et al.
arXiv:2108.03323 [astro-ph.EP] (Published 2021-08-06)
Warm terrestrial planet with half the mass of Venus transiting a nearby star
arXiv:1804.10208 [astro-ph.EP] (Published 2018-04-26)
Robo-AO Kepler Survey V: The effect of physically associated stellar companions on planetary systems
Carl Ziegler et al.