English

A planet-host ratio relation to synthesize microlensing and transiting exoplanet demography from Roman

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2026-02-04 v2 Astrophysics of Galaxies Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

The NASA Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman) will be the first survey able to detect large numbers of both cold and hot exoplanets across Galactic distances: \sim1,400 cold exoplanets via microlensing and \sim200,000 hot, transiting planets. Differing sensitivities to planet bulk properties between the microlensing and transit methods require relations like a planet mass--radius relation (MRR) to mediate. We propose using instead a planet--host {\em ratio} relation (PHRR) to couple directly microlensing and transit observables in demographic forward-modelling simulations. Unlike the MRR, a PHRR uses parameters that are always measured and so can potentially leverage the full Roman exoplanet sample. Using 908 confirmed exoplanets from the NASA Exoplanet Archive, we show that transit depth, δ\delta, and planet--host mass ratio, qq, obey a PHRR that is continuous over all planet scales. The PHRR is improved by including orbital period, PP, and host effective temperature, TT_{\star}. We compare several candidate PHRRs of the form δ(q,T,P)\delta (q,T_\star, P), with the Bayesian Information Criterion favouring power-law dependence on TT_\star and PP, and broken power-law dependence on qq. The break in qq itself depends on TT_\star, as do the power-law slopes in qq either side of the break. The favoured PHRR achieves a fairly uniform 50%50\% relative precision in δ\delta for all qq. Approximately 5%5\% of the sample has a transit depth that is strongly over-predicted by the PHRR; around half of these are associated with large stars (R>2.5RR_\star > 2.5 \, R_{\odot}) potentially subject to Malmquist bias.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.24004,
  title  = {A planet-host ratio relation to synthesize microlensing and transiting exoplanet demography from Roman},
  author = {Kathryn Edmondson and Eamonn Kerins},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.24004},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication in MNRAS