Modelling Light and Velocity Curves of Exoplanet Hosts

RODRIGO F. DÍAZ

Asteroseismology and Exoplanets: Listening to the Stars and Searching for New Worlds

Springer International Publishing

Año: 2018;

Research in extrasolar-planet science is data-driven. With the advent ofradial-velocity instruments like HARPS and HARPS-N, and transit spacemissions like Kepler, our ability to discover and characterise extrasolarplanets is no longer limited by instrumental precision but by our abilityto model the data accurately. This chapter presents the models thatdescribe radial-velocity measurements and transit light curves. I beginby deriving the solution of the two-body problem and from there, theequations describing the radial velocity of a planet-host star and thedistance between star and planet centres, necessary to model transit lightcurves. Stochastic models are then presented and I delineate how theyare used to model complex physical phenomena affecting the exoplanetdata sets, such as stellar activity. Finally, I give a brief overview ofthe processes of Bayesian inference, focussing on the construction oflikelihood functions and prior probability distributions. In particular, Idescribe different methods to specify ignorance priors.