On planetary systems as ordered sequences [EPA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2105.09966


A planetary system consists of a host star and one or more planets, arranged into a particular configuration. Here, we consider what information belongs to the configuration, or ordering, of 4286 Kepler planets in their 3277 planetary systems. First, we train a neural network model to predict the radius and period of a planet based on the properties of its host star and the radii and period of its neighbors. The mean absolute error of the predictions of the trained model is a factor of 2.1 better than the MAE of the predictions of a naive model which draws randomly from dynamically allowable periods and radii. Second, we adapt a model used for unsupervised part-of-speech tagging in computational linguistics to investigate whether planets or planetary systems fall into natural categories with physically interpretable “grammatical rules.” The model identifies two robust groups of planetary systems: (1) compact multi-planet systems and (2) systems around giant stars ($\log{g} \lesssim 4.0$), although the latter group is strongly sculpted by the selection bias of the transit method. These results reinforce the idea that planetary systems are not random sequences — instead, as a population, they contain predictable patterns that can provide insight into the formation and evolution of planetary systems.

Read this paper on arXiv…

E. Sandford, D. Kipping and M. Collins
Mon, 24 May 21
31/41

Comments: 25 pages, 19 figures, accepted to MNRAS