Papers › Efficient, uninformative sampling of limb-darkening coefficients for a three-parameter law
Efficient, uninformative sampling of limb-darkening coefficients for a three-parameter law
David M. Kipping
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Stellar limb-darkening impacts a wide range of astronomical measurements. The accuracy to which it is modelled limits the accuracy in any covariant parameters of interest, such as the radius of a transiting planet. With the ever growing availability of precise observations and the importance of robust estimates of astrophysical parameters, an emerging trend has been to freely fit the limb-darkening coefficients (LDCs) describing a limb-darkening law of choice, in order to propagate our ignorance of the true intensity profile. In practice, this approach has been limited to two-parameter limb-darkening laws, such as the quadratic law, due to the relative ease of sampling the physically allowed range of LDCs. Here, we provide a highly efficient method for sampling LDCs describing a more accurate three-parameter non-linear law. We first derive analytic criteria which can quickly test if a set of LDCs are physical, although naive sampling with these criteria leads to an acceptance rate less than 1%. We then show that the loci of allowed LDCs can be transformed into a cone-like volume, from which we are able to draw uniform samples. We show that samples drawn uniformly from the conal region are physically valid in 97.3% of realizations and encompass 94.4% of the volume of allowed parameter space. We provide Python and Fortran code (LDC3) to sample from this region (and perform the reverse calculation) at https://github.com/davidkipping/LDC3, which also includes a subroutine to efficiently test whether a sample is physically valid or not.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections