Aperture photometry Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-10-20
Aperture photometry estimates brightness by summing calibrated detector pixels in an extraction region and subtracting the estimated background in that region. For equally weighted pixels, let be their total accumulated signal in electrons, the estimated background electrons per pixel over the same exposure, and the exposure duration. Then is a background-subtracted electron rate. Kepler applied aperture photometry to calibrated pixels with a fitted sky background. [ref].
This measurement trades source collection against background: enlarging the extraction region can retain more starlight but includes more sky brightness and neighbouring sources. Photon shot noise, read noise, and uncertainty in background subtraction contribute to its uncertainty. Dividing by a consistently measured reference rate gives a dimensionless light curve; it does not supply an absolute observed radiative flux. If contaminating light remains, the reference includes it and the inferred exoplanet transit depth suffers transit dilution.
In the first toy figure, the source's reference rate is electrons per second, the summed sky contribution is electrons per second, and a known multiplicative response is with in hours from mid-transit. The artificial exoplanet transit depth is , its total duration four hours, and its flat-bottom duration hours; the straight ingress and egress are a toy approximation, not an exact exoplanet transit photometry model. Each synthetic sample averages a -hour exposure and adds seeded normal distribution noise with relative standard deviation . Subtracting the known sky rate and dividing by the known response and reference rate recovers the dip. Real observations require estimating those corrections and carrying their uncertainty.
Atmospheric scale height Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
This is the atmospheric instance of a scale height.
For an isothermal ideal-gas atmosphere, . A strong transmission feature spanning scale heights has approximate transit-depth amplitude .
Exoplanet transit depth Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-10-20
The fractional decrease in observed radiative flux during an exoplanet transit, relative to the out-of-transit baseline. For a uniform star, a dark planet, full disc overlap, and no transit dilution, the exoplanet transit depth is . For a nonuniform star it depends on the blocked specific intensity as well as the radius ratio.
Exoplanet transit photometry Created 2026-10-05 Updated 2026-10-14
Exoplanet transit photometry measures the decrease in a star's observed radiative flux during an exoplanet transit. Define as the unobscured star's observed radiative flux and as the value at time . For a dark, opaque exoplanet crossing a uniformly bright circular stellar disc, a fully superimposed planetary disc blocks exactly the fraction
Here and are the planet and star radii. This exoplanet transit depth determines a radius ratio, ; an absolute planet radius requires an independently estimated stellar radius. For , : a one-percent dip, with . Halving the radius ratio to reduces the exoplanet transit depth to , a quarter as much.
For the central exoplanet transit illustrated below, the transit impact parameter is . Write and let be the projected centre-to-centre separation in units of . The light curve is , where is the overlap area of circles of radii and . There is no overlap when ; the planetary disc is fully inside when , giving . Between those limits, the overlap area grows or shrinks continuously. Thus even a uniform star has curved ingress and egress, with a flat bottom only during full overlap. The illustration uses approximately constant transverse velocity over the short crossing, so with mid-transit at . Analytic models also handle limb darkening. [ref].
Figure 1.
Central transit: a radius ratio of 0.10 blocks one percent of a uniform star
. Details.
The simple exoplanet transit depth formula assumes constant stellar brightness, no limb darkening or starspots, negligible light from the exoplanet, and no transit dilution by other light. It describes full overlap in a non-grazing exoplanet transit, requiring for a full-overlap interval. A grazing exoplanet transit never hides the whole planetary disc against the star, and limb darkening weights different blocked areas differently. Repeating dips are valuable evidence, but eclipsing binary stars and starspots can imitate parts of the signal, so confirmation and joint modelling matter.
Exoplanet transmission spectrum Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-06
An exoplanet transmission spectrum measures the wavelength-dependent area blocked as starlight passes tangentially through the atmosphere during transit.
Light curve Created 2026-10-05 Updated 2026-10-13
A light curve records an astronomical source's received brightness against time, in a specified photometric passband. Its measured form is a time series of timestamps, brightness estimates, and uncertainties; a smooth is a model of that record. Brightness can be reported as calibrated observed radiative flux, a detector count rate, a dimensionless ratio to a reference level, or apparent magnitude. These quantities require different units and calibration conventions. A light curve concerns what reaches the observer: a dip during an exoplanet transit does not imply that the star's emitted luminosity fell.
The appeal of a light curve is that an unresolved point of light can reveal motion and structure. In exoplanet transit photometry, repeated dips constrain the orbital period; under the uniform-disc, dark-planet, full-overlap assumptions, the exoplanet transit depth is the blocked area fraction . A toy one-percent dip therefore corresponds to a radius ratio of . Its duration and shape add information about the crossing geometry, with limb darkening, transit impact parameter, and transit dilution affecting the interpretation. See exoplanet transit photometry for the geometry. The first figure instead follows the measurement: an instrumental trend and sky contribution can obscure a small physical dip.
Figure 1.
Toy light curve: a one-percent transit recovered from a known sky contribution and gain drift; synthetic data, not observations
. Details.
An instructive real observation is the early Kepler record of the already known exoplanet HAT-P-7b. Welsh and colleagues analysed 33.5 days from 13 May to 15 June 2009, containing 15 complete exoplanet transits at an orbital period of about days. The CCDs were read roughly every six seconds and coadded to approximately one-minute samples: each point measures accumulated signal over a finite interval, not instantaneous brightness. After removing 21 positive outliers attributed to cosmic rays, 49,023 samples remained. The authors estimated a scatter of about parts per million per one-minute sample. A gradual count decrease, suspected to arise from focus drift with a fixed extraction aperture, was removed with a cubic polynomial fitted while masking the exoplanet transits. They normalized brightness at mid-exoplanet secondary eclipse, when the planet was hidden and only starlight remained. [ref].
What does the instrument actually measure? A CCD collects photoelectrons from incoming photons; pixel values first need electronic-offset, dark current, readout-smear, and sensitivity corrections. [ref]. Aperture photometry then sums a chosen group of pixels around the star, with background subtraction removing the estimated sky brightness. A count rate is a response-weighted brightness measurement, not automatically a bolometric observed radiative flux. Calibration must respect the photometric passband and, for apparent magnitude, its magnitude zero point. Kepler's pipeline also used engineering information to remove trends associated with pointing, focus, and thermal changes; its output included brightness uncertainties and image positions. [ref].
Calibration and interpretation need separate checks. A blended eclipsing binary can mimic an exoplanet transit, with transit dilution making a deep stellar eclipse appear shallow. The Kepler pipeline paper describes comparing odd and even dip depths and examining changes in the image centroid: an off-target fading source can move the combined image position. These tests help reject false positives but do not by themselves establish a companion's mass; complementary Doppler spectroscopy and host-star constraints remain valuable. [ref].
Even a real exoplanet's signal can have several contributors. Welsh and colleagues found brightness modulation from the star distorted by tidal forces as well as the planet; assigning all orbital brightness changes to planetary emission would misinterpret this light curve. [ref]. Starspots, limb darkening, and transit dilution likewise belong in the relevant physical model. A flexible trend fitted through a dip could absorb that dip; the masked fit in the real example illustrates why the fitting procedure is part of the measurement. Exposure-averaged light curves and phase folding of a light curve make two further limitations explicit.
Adopt circular orbits, negligible planetary masses, spherical bodies, uniform stellar brightness and no transit dilution. Interpret the measured duration as the total duration of a circular planetary transit, from first to fourth contact, . These conventions matter especially for the off-centre crossing: finite planet size cannot automatically be ignored there. Unknown orbital eccentricity or limb darkening would require further information to infer unique stellar radii.
First convert the apparent magnitude difference into a fractional exoplanet transit depth, rather than treating a milli-magnitude as a part in a thousand:
Both crossings are non-grazing because their transit impact parameters satisfy , so the full projected planetary disc can block the star. Equal depths determine equal radius ratios, not equal absolute planet radii.
For orbital inclination measured from the sky plane, . Choosing mid-transit as orbital phase zero, the projected separation obeys
At first and fourth contact, . The full crossing duration therefore is
For the numerical scale use solar radius and nominal solar mass parameter , with one day equal to . These are stated conversion choices, not additional measurements of the two systems.[ref]
Kepler's third law gives . For a solar-mass, solar-radius host, this gives at five days and at two days. Substitution in the contact formula yields
The transit duration of a small planet instead takes both and , giving . It predicts and , respectively. The difference is appreciable for B because the fractional change in its crossing chord is larger. Durations defined by mid-ingress to mid-egress or by second to third contact should not be silently equated with .
Figure 1.
Finite planet size lengthens the contact-to-contact chord, particularly off centre
. Details.
The original diagram uses a straight projected track to display the contact geometry; the duration formula above retains orbital curvature.
To infer the actual stellar radii, invert the contact formula before applying the supplied mass-radius scaling. Let and ; then
The measured durations imply and . Normalize the stipulated constant mass-radius ratio to the Sun, so . Kepler's third law then gives
Thus the stellar radius from transit duration and a linear mass-radius relation is
The same assumed scaling gives and . A's longer crossing requires a lower mean stellar mass density, while B's shorter full-contact crossing requires a higher one. They are not both solar replicas under this model. Their planets have and .
For a consistently applied point-planet approximation, the duration scales as and the inferred radii would instead be , . The latter is close to solar. Consequently the assertion of a substantial non-solar radius for B depends on which duration convention and finite-size approximation are intended. The contact-based values above use the measured depth rather than discarding it. If eccentric orbits are allowed, the transit speed introduces an additional factor depending on eccentricity and orientation, so the two durations alone cannot establish those radii uniquely.
For an outer coplanar planet around B, the common orbital inclination gives . A point-planet centre must cross the stellar disc, requiring . The usual coplanar transit limit is therefore
This is a limiting value approached from below; a tangent path has no duration. For an outer planet of finite, unspecified radius ratio , any overlap instead requires , giving . If it had the same ratio , that geometric limit would be days; requiring full overlap would give days. Because neither its radius nor a photometric detection threshold is supplied, no unique finite-size practical maximum period can be inferred beyond this conditional expression. The stellar radius cancels from the point-planet period-ratio bound.
For B's inner planet, a reflected-light planetary phase curve has
where is geometric albedo and is phase angle. Near exoplanet secondary eclipse the visible hemisphere is almost fully illuminated. Using the standard full-phase approximation and the contact-based ,
The exact lost fraction of combined stellar and planetary light is , which changes the result negligibly at this contrast. The corresponding magnitude depth is about milli-magnitudes. The circular orbit has the same impact distance at eclipse as at transit, and , so the star can hide the entire planetary disc.
The inclination inferred for B is , putting closest approach to full phase at . A fully precise prediction would therefore also require the reflected-light phase function, which the question does not specify; the boxed value uses . The consistent point-planet duration approximation yields about instead, through its different inferred . It is important to keep the geometry used for the radius inference and the reflected-light calculation consistent.
Finally, the stellar radial-velocity semi-amplitude for a low-mass companion on a circular orbit is
The two stars' equal apparent magnitudes make a comparison at similar photon statistics plausible, though spectral-line widths, stellar variability and observing cadence can still differ. With the contact-based stellar estimates,
If the planets have comparable mean densities, A is easier: their equal depth then gives , so . The larger planetary mass outweighs A's longer orbital period and larger host mass. For equal planetary masses, B is easier by a factor in amplitude. The supplied transit data give planet radii, not masses, so the ranking is conditional on a planetary mass-radius assumption; a unique unconditional ranking would invent information.
The principal feature is the abundance of planets with radii of roughly one to a few Earth radii compared with large gas giants within the stated short-period sample. The smallest few plotted bins are of broadly similar height, followed by a substantial decline at larger sizes. Thus the figure supports a high occurrence of small planets relative to giants, rather than an indefinitely steep rise toward arbitrarily small sizes. The horizontal scale is logarithmic: one should compare counts in the displayed bins with their widths in , not mistake a bin count for a density per unit linear radius.
The vertical axis is an average number of planets per target star. This exoplanet occurrence rate need not equal the fraction of stars hosting a planet, because one star can host several. The restriction to periods below days also matters: the figure is not a census of distant gas giants or of every planet in a system. Neither the detailed reduction procedure nor the raw detection counts are specified in the caption, so they cannot be reconstructed uniquely from the histogram.
Selection effects actually make the small-planet population harder to see. A full, undiluted exoplanet transit depth is approximately . For independent photometric errors of fractional size per sample, an idealized detection signal-to-noise ratio is
where counts in-transit samples. At fixed star and orbital period, halving planet radius reduces this amplitude by four. Fainter hosts, correlated stellar noise, gaps and transit vetting reduce transit survey completeness further. Geometric transit probability also falls with orbital distance, for fixed stellar mass. For a fixed observing baseline and cadence, the small-planet circular duration law gives and approximately .
Recovering an intrinsic exoplanet occurrence rate therefore requires correcting for geometric alignments, incomplete recovery and false positives. An illustrative estimator for a radius-period bin is
where is the recovery probability over the relevant target sample and accounts for candidate reliability. Real analyses must average these probabilities over heterogeneous targets and measurement uncertainty; the formula indicates the required weights, not a reconstruction of the unpublished inputs to this figure. A primary Kepler space telescope analysis explicitly models both false positives and incomplete detection to infer occurrence.[ref]
Thus the apparent preference for small planets cannot be explained by their being photometrically easier to detect. Small transits are harder. A plateau in occurrence below about twice Earth's size was independently reported using synthetic-transit injection and recovery, though that study used a different –-day selection and is not identified here as the source of the exam's plot.[ref]
The natural physical framework is core accretion in a protoplanetary disk. Most initial disk mass is gas, principally hydrogen and helium; a much smaller fraction is solid material. Protoplanetary dust coagulation first assembles aggregates through low-speed sticking. Settling and differential drag help concentrate solids, but bouncing, the fragmentation barrier to dust growth and radial drift of solids in a gas disk prevent a simple assumption that every collision grows a body smoothly to planetary size. Concentration in dust traps or through streaming instability, followed by gravitational collapse of a dense solid population, provides routes to planetesimals. Subsequent collisions must dissipate sufficient relative energy to bind material rather than disrupt it.
Once sufficiently large planetesimals exist, gravitational focusing enhances their accretion cross-sections:
When background random velocities remain small, larger bodies grow disproportionately fast in runaway planetesimal growth. As they become massive enough to stir the surrounding population, oligarchic growth develops: several planetary embryos occupy neighboring feeding zones, while much of the remaining solid material resides in smaller planetesimals. Heating the planetesimal random motions weakens gravitational focusing, and local depletion drives the embryos toward an isolation mass. Collisions among embryos can continue assembly after gas dispersal.
This solid-building pathway naturally produces many modest cores. Producing a large gas giant requires an additional, time-sensitive step: a sufficiently massive core must acquire and cool a gaseous envelope while disk gas remains available. Gas captured by a low-mass core releases gravitational potential energy; the envelope's ability to radiate that energy governs its contraction and further accretion. A characteristic cooling estimate is
where includes the envelope’s gravitational and internal energies. This states an energy budget rather than a calibrated accretion timescale. Increasing core mass generally facilitates faster gas growth in the appropriate envelope regime. The critical core mass for gas accretion depends on opacity, solid accretion heating and disk conditions; no one exact threshold follows from the histogram. If envelope cooling becomes rapid enough and gas supply persists, runaway gas accretion can produce a giant. If core growth or cooling is too slow, protoplanetary disk dispersal removes the reservoir first, leaving a rocky core or a smaller planet with a limited envelope.
The snow line changes the supply of condensed solids: where water ice can survive, additional solid material can help cores grow. Its location depends on the evolving disk temperature and pressure, so there is no universal orbital radius at which giants must form. Short-period planets need not have assembled entirely at their present locations. Planetary migration can carry cores and giants inward; scattering and collisions can further reshape their orbits. Pebble accretion is another way to supply solids rapidly to embryos, but its efficiency depends on particle coupling and the available pebble flow. These processes alter the distribution without requiring every core to become a giant.
Radius also is not a linear proxy for mass. A relatively small hydrogen-helium envelope can increase a planet's radius substantially, so some planets with a few Earth radii need not be purely rocky. Contraction as planets cool and irradiation-driven atmospheric escape can subsequently reduce their radii. Hence the final histogram combines solid growth, gas capture, migration and later thermal evolution. In particular, the smallest bins need not all share one composition or one formation location.
Direct fragmentation through gravitational instability of an astrophysical disk is an alternative route to massive gaseous objects. It requires a sufficiently self-gravitating disk, described locally by Toomre's stability criterion, together with sufficiently rapid cooling for bound fragments to survive. It does not naturally explain the dominant population of small close-in cores by itself, although migration or further evolution can change the locations of fragments. The observed abundance of small planets is therefore consistent with solid cores commonly forming while only a minority acquire a massive gas envelope before disk dispersal. It does not uniquely prove a particular prescription for each uncertain growth stage.
The physical explanation is widespread core formation combined with restricted access to runaway gas accretion. The strongest observational conclusion concerns small versus giant planets in the stated period range, after accounting for selection; the figure alone does not determine a universal core threshold, a unique mass distribution, or the population beyond the period cut.
A exoplanet transit occurs when a planet crosses the projected stellar disk and blocks some stellar flux. For a circular orbit with isotropically distributed angular-momentum directions, is uniform on . A transit requires , so
For a dark planet, a uniformly bright stellar disk and negligible dilution, the transit exoplanet transit depth is . For , a small planet and impact parameter ,
The central-transit result sets . A first-to-fourth-contact duration retaining planet size replaces by and includes the exact projected-speed geometry when needed. Eccentricity, limb darkening and grazing geometry modify these expressions.
The common one-per-cent exoplanet transit depth gives . Apply the supplied main-sequence mass-radius relation, , and Kepler's third law, neglecting the planet mass. For days,
The companions are approximately Jupiter-sized and Earth-sized respectively; these are sizes, not independently determined masses. The duration uses the small-planet chord approximation. Counting the finite planet radius would increase first-to-fourth-contact durations by about ten per cent for central transits.
For equal distance, passband, cadence and noise dominated by stellar photon counting, the supplied mass-luminosity relation makes the solar-mass host about times more luminous, with a transit about times longer. At equal fractional exoplanet transit depth, signal-to-noise per event scales as , favouring the solar-mass host by about . Equal apparent brightness would remove the luminosity advantage but retain the duration advantage. Without distances and noise properties the relative detectability is conditional. Transit probability is also larger for the solar-mass case, about versus .
Reducing orbital inclination from exactly edge-on increases the impact parameter and shortens the chord, giving in the small-planet, circular approximation. For a uniformly bright disk, a fully internal transit retains approximately the same exoplanet transit depth . Once grazing, the occulted area and exoplanet transit depth decrease; for the exoplanet transit disappears. With limb darkening, a higher- path is also typically shallower before grazing.
A dark, opaque circular planet of radius blocks specific intensity over its overlap with the projected star. With and no transit dilution, the instantaneous exoplanet transit depth is exactly
When , the entire planetary disk is inside the stellar disk, and specific intensity varies little across that disk, small-planet transit weighting reduces to
Here is the projected centre separation divided by . The numerator samples the local specific intensity; the denominator normalizes by the whole star's mean specific intensity. The small-size argument and the distinction between full overlap and ingress are explicit in the original analytic treatment. [ref]
For a short approximately straight crossing at constant transverse velocity , write with at mid-transit, and let be the transit impact parameter. Then and . With stipulated and , a central crossing has mid-transit exoplanet transit depth approximately , whereas gives . A uniform disk would give for either fully overlapping crossing. The brighter central chord produces a deeper dip and the off-centre chord a shorter crossing at the same .
Figure 1.
Two transit chords across the same synthetic limb-darkened disk flux distribution
. Stipulated and ; the coloured curves integrate the occulted specific intensity over the finite planetary disk, including ingress and egress. Dashed curves show small-planet transit weighting only where the whole planetary disk is inside the star. Horizontal dotted segments give the uniform-disk full-overlap depth . The chord panel shows mid-transit positions; the horizontal coordinate in the light curve is distance travelled divided by stellar radius, equivalent to scaled time at constant transverse velocity. Details.
At fixed away from the edge, a two-dimensional Taylor's theorem expansion over the symmetric planetary disk cancels the first derivatives; the first correction to the blocked radiant flux is of order if the second derivatives remain bounded. This error estimate is not uniform at the edge, where the radial derivative of the linear limb-darkening law diverges. Ingress, egress, a grazing exoplanet transit, and a crossing of a starspot require the overlap integral or a suitable more complete model. Inferring without the local-to-mean specific intensity ratio can bias the estimated planet radius.
Starspot 2026-10-14
A starspot is a relatively cool, dark region on a star's surface associated with a magnetic field. Starspots change the light curve as the star rotates. A planet crossing a starspot blocks less light than it would from an unspotted region, producing a local upward anomaly during an exoplanet transit; unocculted starspots can instead deepen the normalized exoplanet transit depth. They can also distort spectral lines and imitate a Doppler spectroscopy signal.
Stellar radius Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-25
The physical radius assigned to a star, with a specified surface convention.
Transit dilution 2026-10-14
Constant extra light makes an exoplanet transit appear shallower. If the host star supplies out-of-transit observed radiative flux and an unresolved source supplies , let . Then . For , a true exoplanet transit depth of appears as ; ignoring transit dilution gives a radius ratio instead of , under the same uniform-disc assumptions.