RoadRunner: a fast and flexible exoplanet transit model

Abstract

I present RoadRunner, a fast exoplanet transit model that can use any radially symmetric function to model stellar limb darkening while still being faster to evaluate than the analytical transit model for quadratic limb darkening by Mandel & Agol (2002). CPU and GPU implementations of the model are available in the PyTransit transit modelling package, and come with platform-independent parallelisation, supersampling, and support for modelling complex heterogeneous time series. The code is written in numba-accelerated Python (and the GPU model in OpenCL) without C or Fortran dependencies, which allows for the limb darkening model to be given as any Python-callable function. Finally, as an example of the flexibility of the approach, the latest version of PyTransit comes with a numerical limb darkening model that uses LDTk-generated limb darkening profiles directly without approximating them by analytical models.

Accepted to MNRAS

References in corpus (4)

• Homogeneous studies of transiting extrasolar planets. I. Light curve analyses
• Limb darkening and exoplanets: testing stellar model atmospheres and identifying biases in transit parameters
• PyTransit: Fast and Easy Exoplanet Transit Modelling in Python
• The effect of stellar limb darkening values on the accuracy of the planet radii derived from photometric transit observations