Stellar Metallicity & Giant Planets

The Metallicity Dependence of Giant Planet Incidence

Authors:

Gonzalez et al

Abstract:

We describe three corrections that should be applied to the observed relative incidence of nearby stars hosting giant planets. These are diffusion in the stellar atmosphere, use of the [Ref] index in place of [Fe/H] for metallicity, and correction for local sampling with the W velocity. We have applied these corrections to a subset of the SPOCS exoplanet survey with uniform giant planet detectability. Fitting the binned data to a power law of the form, α10β[Fe/H], we derived α=0.022±0.007 and β=3.0±0.5; this value of β is 50\% larger than the value determined by \citet{fv05}. While the statistical significance of this difference is marginal, given the small number statistics, these corrections should be included in future analyses that include larger samples.