Measuring the mass of Kepler-78b using nonparametric Gaussian process estimation

Abstract

Measuring the masses of rocky planets is quite difficult, as the relevant signal produced by such planets is often dwarfed by stellar activity by an order of magnitude or more. Developing a more robust way to isolate the stellar activity in these measurements is crucial to the search for Earth-like planets. We estimate the mass of Earth-size planet Kepler-78b using a Gaussian process estimator to describe the stellar activity in both photometric and radial velocity (RV) data, confirming previous results with a more robust technique that can be extended toward Earth analogues.