PROBABILISTIC FORECASTING OF THE MASSES AND RADII OF OTHER WORLDS

ABSTRACT Mass and radius are two of the most fundamental properties of an astronomical object. Increasingly, new planet discoveries are being announced with a measurement of one of these quantities, but not both. This has led to a growing need to forecast the missing quantity using the other, especially when predicting the detectability of certain follow-up observations. We present an unbiased forecasting model built upon a probabilistic mass–radius relation conditioned on a sample of 316 well-constrained objects. Our publicly available code, Forecaster , accounts for observational errors, hyper-parameter uncertainties, and the intrinsic dispersions observed in the calibration sample. By conditioning our model…