A Guide to Realistic Uncertainties on the Fundamental Properties of Solar-type Exoplanet Host Stars

Our understanding of the properties and demographics of exoplanets critically relies on our ability to determine the fundamental properties of their host stars. The advent of Gaia and large spectroscopic surveys has now made it possible, in principle, to infer the properties of individual stars, including most exoplanet hosts, to very high precision. However, we show that, in practice, such analyses are limited by uncertainties in both the fundamental scale and our models of stellar evolution, even for stars similar to the Sun. For example, we show that current uncertainties on measured interferometric angular diameters and bolometric fluxes set a systematic uncertainty floor of approximate to 2.4% in temperature, approximate to 2.0% in luminosity, and approximate to 4.2% in radius. Comparisons between widely available model grids suggest uncertainties of order approximate to 5% in mass and approximate to 20% in age for main-sequence and subgiant stars. While the radius uncertainties are roughly constant over this range of stars, the model-dependent uncertainties are a complex function of luminosity, temperature, and metallicity. We provide open-source software for approximating these uncertainties for individual targets and discuss strategies for reducing these uncertainties in the future.

Automated summary

Our understanding of exoplanets relies on determining the properties of their host stars. However, uncertainties in stellar evolution models and fundamental scales limit our ability to do so accurately.