We find five planets exhibiting density variations of >10% and as many as 20 planets with deviations >5%. We extend the work of Burton et al., Correia, and others, using a gravitational potential formulation to a sample of nearly 200 planets with periods less than 3 days. One such effect is the distortion of a short period planet by its host star, affecting its derived density. Improvements in the number of confirmed planets and the precision of observations imply a need to better understand subtle effects that may bias interpretations of exoplanet observations. The planets highlighted in red are those mentioned in Table 2 whose density uncertainty is less than the deviations caused by tides. The right hand panel shows a similar phenomenon for high mass planets, where we show constant-density relations corresponding to solar system gas giants giant densities, as well as a planet with half the density of Saturn and a planet with a density of 0.2g/cm3 representative of ‘super puffs’. Colored bands represent variations of these curves by up to 4.7% in radius, corresponding to density variations of up to 15%. Black curves in the left figure are taken from Zeng et al. The left and right panels refer to low and high mass planets respectively. Mass-Radius relationships along with data points (and error-bars) for the sample of planets considered in this work.
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