Planetary Radii Across Five Orders of Magnitude in Mass and Stellar Insolation: Application to Transits

Details Planetary Radii Across Five Orders of Magnitude in Mass and Stellar Insolation: Application to Transits Planetary Radii Across Five Orders of Magnitude in Mass and Stellar Insolation: Application to Transits

Sep 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006dps....38.1005f&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #38, #10.05; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 38, p.494

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

The forthcoming CoRoT and Kepler space missions promise to detect hundreds of transiting planets in the next several years. CoRoT may be able to detect planets as small at 2 Earth radii (13000 km) and Kepler as small as 1 Mercury radius (2500 km). Planetary systems for which radial velocity measurements can be made will allow for a determination of planetary mass, and hence, bulk density. However, obtaining radial velocities will often take years, and many planets will have no direct mass determination. Here we compute mass-radius relations for planets from 0.01 M_Earth to 10 M_Jupiter. We use high pressure equations of state for iron, rock, ice, helium, and hydrogen and make as few assumptions as necessary regarding composition to compute planetary radii over a significant phase space. For the hydrogen/helium-rich planets, we compute self-consistent model atmospheres at distances from 0.02 to 10 AU from the Sun, to correctly include the effects of stellar insolation on the contraction of planets with masses from 1 M_Neptune to 10 M_Jupiter. For all compositions we provide analytic fits to the derived mass-radius relations, which should allow for fast and useful mass estimates when only planetary radii are known. JJF is funded by a Spitzer Fellowship from NASA.

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