A Uniform Determination of the Bulk Metallicities and Alpha Enrichments of Confirmed Exoplanet Systems with TRES
Romy Rodríguez Martínez, Emily K. Pass, Phillip A. Cargile, Victoria DiTomasso, David Charbonneau, Jason D. Eastman, David W. Latham
astro-ph.EP
Submitted: 2026-05-11
Comments: 18 pages, 9 figures, 3 tables; Submitted to ApJ
Code: https://github.com/pacargile/uberMS
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: We present a uniform spectroscopic characterization of 625 F, G, and K stars hosting 859 confirmed exoplanets using high-resolution archival optical spectra from the Tillinghast Reflector Echelle
Terminology
Abstract
We present a uniform spectroscopic characterization of 625 F, G, and K stars hosting 859 confirmed exoplanets using high-resolution archival optical spectra from the Tillinghast Reflector Echelle Spectrograph (TRES). We use the neural network spectral code uberMS, which combines spectra with broadband photometry to estimate precise and accurate stellar parameters. We determine stellar effective temperatures, surface gravities, radii, luminosities, projected rotational velocities, [Fe/H] abundances, and [alpha /Fe] enrichments for most confirmed planet hosts observed by TRES. This uniform catalog can be used for a broad range of astrophysical studies, particularly to explore links between stellar [alpha /Fe] and a suite of observed exoplanet properties. Combining our metallicity measurements with galactic kinematics, we identify 58 planet hosts that are likely members of the thick disk. We investigate the chemical environments of giant-planet formation by comparing the [alpha /Fe] distributions of giant-planet host stars across different metallicity regimes. We find that subsolar metallicity giant-planet hosts are significantly enhanced in [alpha /Fe] relative to Fe-rich giant-planet hosts and to the average Fe-poor field star, at high statistical significance. This suggests that enhanced alpha-element abundances may partially compensate for low-Fe content and thus enable the formation of giant planets in metal-poor environments. We additionally compare the [alpha /Fe] distributions of single- and multi-planet hosts and find modest evidence that alpha-enhanced stars may preferentially host multi-planet systems. Finally, we recover previously observed trends between stellar metallicity and planetary eccentricity.
Sources
- Giant Planets and Eccentric Orbits Are Common Around Galactic Thick Disc Stars
- The Orbital Eccentricities of Planets in the Kinematic Thin and Thick Galactic Disks
- Composable Effects for Flexible and Accelerated Probabilistic Programming in NumPyro
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