English

Kepler-9 revisited 60% the mass with six times more data

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2014-03-12 v2

Abstract

Kepler-9 was the first case where transit timing variations have been used to confirm the planets in this system. Following predictions of dramatic TTVs - larger than a week - we re-analyse the system based on the full Kepler data set. We re-processed all available data for Kepler-9 removing short and long term trends, measured the times of mid-transit and used those for dynamical analysis of the system. The newly determined masses and radii of Kepler-9b and -9c change the nature of these planets relative to the one described in Holman et al. 2010 (hereafter H10) with very low, but relatively well charcterised (to better than 7%), bulk densities of 0.18 and 0.14 g cm3^3 (about 1/3 of the H10 value). We constrain the masses (45.1 and 31.0 M_\oplus, for Kepler-9b and -9c respectively) from photometry alone, allowing us to see possible indications for an outer non-transiting planet in the radial velocity data. At 2R2R_\oplus Kepler-9d is determined to be larger than suggested before - suggesting that it is a low-mass low-density planet. The comparison between the H10 analysis and our new analysis suggests that small formal error in the TTV inversion may be misleading if the data does not cover a significant fraction of the interaction time scale.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1403.1372,
  title  = {Kepler-9 revisited 60% the mass with six times more data},
  author = {Stefan Dreizler and Aviv Ofir},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1403.1372},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

8 pages, 12 figures, added references