-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 55
Description
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Multiple people have gotten confused by the "a" in KeplerianOrbit. Among astronomers studying transiting exoplanets, "a" is always given either in stellar radii or AU, but never in solar radii. It is easy to mistakenly give a/R_* instead of a/R_sun, especially for Sun-like stars where the two numbers are similar.
This confusion has made it into the literature at least twice. Due to a confusion between a/R_* and a/R_sun, the semimajor axes of three planets (the three around TOI 2076) were misreported by 22%. I then published a paper using the incorrect semimajor axes, causing my flux estimates to be off by 40%.
Describe the solution you'd like
Change "a" to a_over_Rsun, a_star to a_star_over_Rsun, and a_planet to a_planet_over_Rsun. This has the added benefit that both developers and users can easily see where "a" is being used with Ctrl + F.
Additional context
I'm happy to do the change myself and make a pull request.