Mass, radius, and age measurements of young (≲100 Myr) planets have the power to shape our understanding of planet formation. However, young stars tend to be extremely variable in both photometry and radial velocity (RV) measurements, which makes constraining these properties challenging. The V1298 Tau system of four ∼0.5 RJ planets transiting a pre-main-sequence star presents an important, if stress-inducing, opportunity to observe and measure directly the properties of infant planets. Suárez Mascareño et al. published radial-velocity-derived masses for two of the V1298 Tau planets using a state-of-the-art Gaussian process regression framework. The planetary densities computed from these masses were surprisingly high, implying extremely rapid contraction after formation in tension with most existing planet-formation theories. In an effort to constrain further the masses of the V1298 Tau planets, we obtained 36 RVs using Keck/HIRES, and analyzed them in concert with published RVs and photometry. Through performing a suite of cross-validation tests, we found evidence that the preferred model of Suárez Mascareño et al. suffers from overfitting, defined as the inability to predict unseen data, rendering the masses unreliable. We detail several potential causes of this overfitting, many of which may be important for other RV analyses of other active stars, and recommend that additional time and resources be allocated to understanding and mitigating activity in active young stars such as V1298 Tau.
Overfitting Affects the Reliability of Radial Velocity Mass Estimates of the V1298 Tau Planets
- Creators
- Blunt, Sarah
- Carvalho, Adolfo
- David, Trevor J.
- Beichman, Charles1
- Zink, Jon K.
- Gaidos, Eric
- Behmard, Aida
- Bouma, Luke G.
- Cody, Devin
- Dai, Fei
- Foreman-Mackey, Daniel
- Grunblatt, Sam
- Howard, Andrew W.1
- Kosiarek, Molly
- Knutson, Heather A.1
- Rubenzahl, Ryan A.
- Beard, Corey
- Chontos, Ashley
- Giacalone, Steven
- Hirano, Teruyuki
- Johnson, Marshall C.
- Lubin, Jack
- Akana Murphy, Joseph M.
- Petigura, Erik A
- Van Zandt, Judah
- Weiss, Lauren
Abstract
Copyright and License
© 2023. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
Acknowledgement
S.B. wishes to thank first and foremost Alejandro Suárez Mascareño for constructive and helpful thoughts throughout the preparation of this study. S.B. also wishes to thank the small army of people who shaped this analysis through conversation: Jason Wang and his research group, Heather Knutson's research group, the folks at the Flatiron CCA, the University of Michigan Exoplanet Journal Club, the UC Riverside Astrobiology Seminar group, Johanna Teske and the astronomers of the Carnegie Earth and Planets Laboratory, Jéa Adams, Kim Paragas, Shreyas Vissapragada, Ward Howard, and Roberto Tejada Arevalo. All of the authors thank both the anonymous referee and the anonymous statistics editor for helpful comments that made us further question our assumptions and improved this work.
J.M.A.M. is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under grant No. DGE-1842400. J.M.A.M. acknowledges the LSSTC Data Science Fellowship Program, which is funded by LSSTC, NSF Cybertraining grant No. 1829740, the Brinson Foundation, and the Moore Foundation; his participation in the program has benefited this work. T.H. is supported by JSPS KAKENHI grant Nos. JP19K14783 and JP21H00035.
S.B. wishes to acknowledge her status as a settler on the ancestral lands of the Gabrielino/Tongva people, and to recognize that the astronomical observations described in this paper were only possible because of the dispossession of Maunakea from Kanāka Maoli. We seek to work toward a scientific practice guided by pono and a future in which we all honor the land.
Software References
This research was enabled by the following software: numpy (Harris et al. 2020), Lightkurve, a Python package for Kepler and TESS data analysis (Lightkurve Collaboration et al. 2018), pandas (McKinney 2010), matplotlib (Hunter 2007), scipy (Virtanen et al. 2020), astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013, 2018, 2022), jax (Bradbury et al. 2018), george (Ambikasaran et al. 2015), celerite (Foreman-Mackey et al. 2017), tinygp (Foreman-Mackey et al. 2022) 37 , and radvel (Fulton et al. 2018).
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Additional details
- ISSN
- 1538-3881
- National Science Foundation
- NSF Graduate Research Fellowship DGE-1842400
- Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Corporation
- National Science Foundation
- OAC-1829740
- Brinson Foundation
- Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
- JP19K14783
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
- JP21H00035
- Caltech groups
- Astronomy Department, Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC), Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, Thirty Meter Telescope