Habitable Zones & Global Climate

Revised Exoplanet Radii and Habitability Using Gaia Data Release 2

By Keith Cowing
Press Release
astro-ph.EP
August 14, 2018
Filed under
Revised Exoplanet Radii and Habitability Using Gaia Data Release 2
Gaia

Accurate stellar properties are crucial for determining exoplanet characteristics. Gaia DR2 presents revised distances, luminosities, and radii for 1.6 billion stars.

Here, we report the calculation of revised radii and densities for 320 exoplanets using this data and present updated calculations of the incident flux received by 690 known exoplanets. This allows the likelihood that those planets orbit in the habitable zone of their host stars to be reassessed. As a result of this analysis, three planets can be added to the catalogue of potentially habitable worlds: HIP 67537 b, HD 148156 b, and HD 106720 b. In addition, the changed parameterisation of BD +49 898 means that its planet, BD +49 898 b, now receives an incident flux that places it outside the optimistic habitable zone region, as defined by (Kopparapu et al. 2013, 2014). We find that use of the new Gaia data results in a mean increase in calculated exoplanet radius of 3.76%. Previously, CoRoT-3 b had been reported as having the highest density of all known exoplanets.

Here, we use updated information to revise the calculated density of CoRoT-3 b from 26.4g cm−3 to 17.3±2.9g cm−3. We also report the densest exoplanet in our dataset, KELT-1 b, with a density of 23.7±4.0gcm−3. Overall, our results highlight the importance of ensuring the the parameterisation of known exoplanets be revisited whenever significant improvements are made to the precision of the stellar parameters upon which they are based.

Daniel Johns, Connor Marti, Madison Huff, Jacob McCann, Robert A. Wittenmyer, Jonathan Horner, Duncan J. Wright
(Submitted on 14 Aug 2018)

Comments: The authors note that this paper has just been submitted to the AAS journals. We have posted it prior to acceptance to ensure that the data in the data tables is available to the wider community as quickly as possible
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:1808.04533 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:1808.04533v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Daniel Johns
[v1] Tue, 14 Aug 2018 05:37:03 GMT (734kb,D)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.04533
Astrobiology

Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Station Payload manager/space biologist, Away Teams, Journalist, Lapsed climber, Synaesthete, Na’Vi-Jedi-Freman-Buddhist-mix, ASL, Devon Island and Everest Base Camp veteran, (he/him) 🖖🏻