Thursday, March 29, 2012

1203.6072 (Amir Weissbein et al.)

Sterile and Fertile Planetary Systems - Statistical Analysis of Multi-Planet Systems in Kepler's data    [PDF]

Amir Weissbein, Elad Steinberg, Re'em Sari
The Kepler mission has discovered a large number of planetary systems. We analyze the implications of the discovered single/multi-exoplanet systems from Kepler's data. We test a simple model in which the intrinsic occurrence of plant is an independent process, and with equal probability around all planet producing stars. This leads to a poisson distribution for the intrinsic number of planets around each host. However, the possibility of zero/low mutual inclination is taken into account, creating a correlation between detecting different planets in a given solar system, leading to a non poisson distribution for the number of transiting planets per system. Comparing the model's predictions with the observations made by Kepler, we find that the correlation produced by planarity is insufficient and a higher correlation is needed. This implies that either the formation of one planet in the system enhances the likelihood of other planets to form, or that some stars are considerably more fertile than others. Followup observations on Kepler planet's hosts can help pinpoint the physical nature of this correlation.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.6072

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