I’m going to try to post on a semi-regular basis about whatever astronomy thing has interested me on a given day. it’s probably be a bit random and not well explained.

Today I was chatting with some by Kepler buddies about a paper by Ofir where they measure the mass of two planets orbiting KOI-1574 using transit timing variations. The part I find interesting is that Ofir finds one of the planets has a density of 0.1 g/cc – much lower than any planet in our own Solar System. We were concerned with the uniqueness of the solution given there are only 4 transits of the planets of each planet in the Kepler data.

Dan Foreman-Mackey has been developing an n-body/transit model code that can be used to used to model systems like KOI-1574. I hope/plan to run an MCMC simulation that should reveal whether the ultra-low density found by Ofir is significant and robust. Not that I’m trying to pick on Ofir, his analysis seems perfectly reasonable to me. It does however provide a convenient example to test the code upon.