| Issue |
A&A
Volume 704, December 2025
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | L19 | |
| Number of page(s) | 7 | |
| Section | Letters to the Editor | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202557774 | |
| Published online | 18 December 2025 | |
Letter to the Editor
Inferring planet occurrence rates from radial velocities
Observatoire Astronomique de l’Université de Genève, Chemin Pegasi 51b, 1290 Versoix, Switzerland
★ Corresponding author: joao.faria@unige.ch
Received:
20
October
2025
Accepted:
1
December
2025
We introduce a new method to infer the posterior distribution for planet occurrence rates from radial velocity (RV) observations. The approach combines posterior samples from the analysis of individual RV datasets of several stars, using importance sampling to re-weight them appropriately. This eliminates the need for injection-recovery tests to compute detection limits and avoids the explicit definition of a detection threshold. We validate the method on simulated RV datasets and show that it yields unbiased estimates of the occurrence rate in different regions with increasing precision as more stars are included in the analysis.
Key words: methods: data analysis / methods: statistical / techniques: radial velocities
© The Authors 2025
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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