Mass-radius relationship of 34 Kepler planets

This is especially helpful when the host star is not bright enough for a radial velocity (RV) follow-up. However, {in the past decade}, a number of works have shown that TTV- characterised planets tend to have lower densities than planets characterised on the basis of RVs.

Re-analysing 34 Kepler planets in the super-Earth to sub- Neptunes range using the RIVERS approach, we show that at least some of these discrepancies were due to the way transit timings were extracted from the light curve, as a result of their tendency to underestimate the TTV amplitudes. We recovered robust mass estimates (i.e. with low prior dependency) for 23 of the planets. We compared these planets the RV- characterised population and found that a large fraction of those that previously had unusually low density estimates were adjusted, allowing them to occupy a place on the mass-radius diagram much closer to the bulk of known planets.