Observational biases for transiting planets

Understand

Observational biases distort our view of nature, such that the patterns we see within a surveyed population of interest are often unrepresentative of the truth we seek.

• Transiting planets currently represent the most informative data set on the ensemble properties of exoplanets within 1 AU of their star.
• However, the transit method is inherently biased due to both geometric and detection-driven effects.
• In this work, we derive the overall observational biases affecting the most basic transit parameters from first principles.