Leveraging the Power of a Planet Population: Compositions, Mass-Radius Relation, and Host Star Multiplicity of Kepler’s Super-Earths

Angie Wolfgang (UC Santa Cruz)

October 21, 2014

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Abstract: The Kepler Mission has found thousands of planetary candidates with radii between 1 and 4 times that of Earth. These planets have no analogues in our Solar System, providing a potentially revolutionary opportunity to assess planet formation and evolution processes for a new planetary population. By coupling theoretical work with sophisticated statistical modeling, we place quantitative constraints on the distribution of physically relevant properties, such as planet compositions, while accurately incorporating the large uncertainties and biases in the Kepler data. We first apply this framework to the composition distribution of Kepler’s sub-Neptunes: assuming an internal structure consisting of a rocky core with a hydrogen and helium envelope, we find that these envelopes are most likely to be ~ 1% of these planets’ total mass with an intrinsic scatter of +- 0.5 dex. Our results do not produce a one-to-one relationship between super-Earth masses and radii. Accordingly, we derive a probability density function that incorporates the intrinsic scatter in planetary masses at a given radius, which provides dynamical studies a more appropriate means to map Kepler radii to masses. Finally, we present first results from our campaign to detect stellar companions to Kepler super-Earth host stars using the laser guide star adaptive optics systems at Lick Observatory, and discuss implications for the orbital evolution of this entirely new class of planets.