Revised exoplanet radii and habitability using Gaia Data Release 2

Revised exoplanet radii and habitability using Gaia Data Release 2

Accurate stellar properties are crucial for determining exoplanet characteristics. Gaia DR2 presents revised distances, luminosities, and radii for 1.6 billion stars. Here, we report the calculation of revised radii and densities for 320 exoplanets using this data and present updated calculations of the incident flux received by 690 known exoplanets. This allows the likelihood that those planets orbit in the habitable zone of their host stars to be reassessed. As a result of this analysis, three planets can be added to the catalogue of potentially habitable worlds: HIP~67537~b, HD~148156~b, and HD~106720~b. In addition, the changed parameterisation of BD~+49~898 means that its planet, BD~+49~898~b, now receives an incident flux that places it outside the optimistic habitable zone region, as defined by \citep{Kopparapu2013,Kopparapu2014}. We find that use of the new \textit{Gaia} data results in a mean increase in calculated exoplanet radius of 3.76\%. Previously, CoRoT-3 b had been reported as having the highest density of all known exoplanets. Here, we use updated information to revise the calculated density of CoRoT-3~b from 26.4\$g\:cm^{-3}$ to 17.3$\pm2.9g\:cm^{-3}$. We also report the densest exoplanet in our dataset, KELT-1~b, with a density of 23.7$\pm4.0g\:cm^{-3}$. Overall, our results highlight the importance of ensuring the the parameterisation of known exoplanets be revisited whenever significant improvements are made to the precision of the stellar parameters upon which they are based.

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