On planetary systems as ordered sequences

Abstract

A planetary system consists of a host star and one or more planets, arranged into a particular configuration. Here, we consider what information belongs to the configuration, or ordering, of 4286 Kepler planets in their 3277 planetary systems. First, we train a neural network model to predict the radius and period of a planet based on the properties of its host star and the radii and period of its neighbors. The mean absolute error of the predictions of the trained model is a factor of 2.1 better than the MAE of the predictions of a naive model which draws randomly from dynamically allowable periods and radii. Second, we adapt a model used for unsupervised part-of-speech tagging in computational linguistics to investigate whether planets or planetary systems fall into natural categories with physically interpretable "grammatical rules." The model identifies two robust groups of planetary systems: (1) compact multi-planet systems and (2) systems around giant stars ($\log g\lesssim 4.0$), although the latter group is strongly sculpted by the selection bias of the transit method. These results reinforce the idea that planetary systems are not random sequences -- instead, as a population, they contain predictable patterns that can provide insight into the formation and evolution of planetary systems.

arXiv comment25 pages, 19 figures, accepted to MNRAS

References in corpus (24)

• The California-Kepler Survey. III. A Gap in the Radius Distribution of Small Planets
• Protoplanetary Disks and Their Evolution
• A low mass for Mars from Jupiter's early gas-driven migration
• The Occurrence and Architecture of Exoplanetary Systems
• The NASA Exoplanet Archive: Data and Tools for Exoplanet Research
• Prevalence of Earth-size planets orbiting Sun-like stars
• Architecture and Dynamics of Kepler's Candidate Multiple Transiting Planet Systems
• Architecture of Kepler's Multi-transiting Systems: II. New investigations with twice as many candidates
• Probabilistic Forecasting of the Masses and Radii of Other Worlds
• The California-Kepler Survey V. Peas in a Pod: Planets in a Kepler Multi-planet System are Similar in Size and Regularly Spaced
• Architecture of Planetary Systems Based on Kepler Data: Number of Planets and Coplanarity
• The statistics of multi-planet systems
• Kepler Multi-Planet Systems Exhibit Unexpected Intra-system Uniformity in Mass and Radius
• Young Solar System's Fifth Giant Planet?
• The Kepler Dichotomy among the M Dwarfs: Half of Systems Contain Five or More Coplanar Planets
• Jupiter's Decisive Role in the Inner Solar System's Early Evolution
• Comparing HARPS and Kepler surveys: The alignment of multiple-planet systems
• On The Relative Sizes of Planets Within Kepler Multiple Candidate Systems
• Accounting for Incompleteness due to Transit Multiplicity in Kepler Planet Occurrence Rates
• Deeply Uncertain: Comparing Methods of Uncertainty Quantification in Deep Learning Algorithms
• An information theoretic framework for classifying exoplanetary system architectures
• The multiplicity distribution of Kepler's exoplanets
• Hidden Worlds: Dynamical Architecture Predictions of Undetected Planets in Multi-planet Systems and Applications to TESS Systems
• Do planets remember how they formed?

Cited by in corpus (6)

• A roadmap for the atmospheric characterization of terrestrial exoplanets with JWST
• A framework for the architecture of exoplanetary systems. II. Nature versus nurture: Emergent formation pathways of architecture classes
• Earth-like planet predictor: A machine learning approach
• On the Ordering of Exoplanet Systems
• An Informational-Entropic Approach to Exoplanet Characterization
• The Number of Transits Per Epoch for Transiting Misaligned Circumbinary Planets