A Probabilistic Approach to Kepler Completeness and Reliability for Exoplanet Occurrence Rates [EPA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1906.03575


Exoplanet catalogs produced by surveys suffer from a lack of completeness (not every planet is detected) and less than perfect reliability (not every planet in the catalog is a true planet). Occurrence rate studies of the exoplanet population structure using such a catalog must be corrected for completeness and reliability. The final Kepler data release, DR25, features a uniformly vetted planet candidate catalog and completeness and reliability products that allow for occurrence rates that are corrected for completeness and reliability. We present a new probabilistic approach to the characterization of Kepler completeness and reliability, making full use of the Kepler DR25 completeness and reliability products. Our approach is robust against sparse data. We illustrate the impact of completeness and reliability using a standard Poisson-likelihood-based occurrence rate method, using a recent stellar properties catalog that incorporates Gaia stellar radii and uniform treatment of the entire stellar population. This is the first exoplanet occurrence rate calculation that makes full use of the DR25 completeness and reliability products. We find that correcting for reliability reduces by a factor of two the occurrence of exoplanets with orbital period and radius within 20% of Earth’s around GK dwarf stars, from 0.044+0.021-0.015 to 0.019+0.012-0.008. We also explore alternative occurrence rates, and show that using Gaia-based stellar radii rather than those in the DR25 stellar properties reduces occurrence rates by a factor of two. This work is an example of how the community can use the DR25 completeness and reliability products, which are publicly available at the NASA Exoplanet Archive (this http URL) and the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (this http URL).

Read this paper on arXiv…

S. Bryson, J. Coughlin, N. Batalha, et. al.
Tue, 11 Jun 19
21/60

Comments: Preliminary draft for a tutorial at the June 2019 AAS meeting in St. Louis