A sample of 7146 M or K-dwarfs from KIC and Gaia

Many observers have noted a tendency for Jovian planets to form around stars with higher metallicities; however, there is no consensus on a trend for smaller planets. Here, we investigate the planet-metallicity correlation for rocky planets in single and multi-planet systems around Kepler M-dwarf and late-K-dwarf stars.

Due to molecular blanketing and the dim nature of these low-mass stars, it is difficult to make direct elemental abundance measurements via spectroscopy. We instead use a combination of accurate and uniformly measured parallaxes and photometry to obtain relative metallicities and validate this method with a subsample of spectroscopically determined metallicities. We use the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) test, Mann-Whitney U-test, and Anderson-Darling (AD) test to compare the compact multiple planetary systems with single-transiting planet systems and systems with no detected transiting planets.