Abundances of solar twins from Keck/HIRES

We have determined the fundamental parameters and chemical composition of the Kepler-11 host star to unprecedented precision using an extremely high-quality spectrum from Keck-HIRES (R~67000, S/N per pixel ~260 at 600nm). Contrary to previously published results, our spectroscopic constraints indicate that Kepler-11 is a young main-sequence solar twin.

The revised stellar parameters and new analysis raise the densities of the Kepler-11 planets by between 20% and 95% per planet, making them more typical of the emerging class of "puffy" close-in exoplanets. We obtain photospheric abundances of 22 elements and find that Kepler-11 has an abundance pattern similar to that of the Sun with a slightly higher overall metallicity. We additionally analyze the Kepler light curves using a photodynamical model and discuss the tension between spectroscopic and transit/TTV-based estimates of stellar density.