Exoplanetology: Exoplanets & Exomoons

Precise Transit Photometry Using TESS II: Revisiting 28 Additional Transiting Systems With Updated Physical Properties

By Keith Cowing
Status Report
astro-ph.EP
August 13, 2024
Filed under , , , , ,
Precise Transit Photometry Using TESS II: Revisiting 28 Additional Transiting Systems With Updated Physical Properties
Observed and best-fit model light-curves (one transit event) for WASP-79 b, WASP-94A b, WASP-131 b and WASP-82 b. For each observed transit, Top: the unprocessed light-curve (cyan), light-curve after wavelet denoising (magenta), the best-fit transit model (blue). Middle: the residual after modelling without GP regression (magenta), the mean (blue) and 1-σ interval (cyan) of the best-fit GP regression model. Bottom: mean residual flux (blue). The mean residual flux corresponds to the residual flux considering the mean of the best fit GP regression model. — astro-ph.EP

Precise physical properties of the known transiting exoplanets are essential for their precise atmospheric characterization using modern and upcoming instruments. Leveraging the large volume of high SNR photometric follow-up data from TESS, highly precise physical properties can be estimated for these systems, especially for those discovered using ground-based instruments prior to the TESS mission.

In this work, I have used the publicly available TESS follow-up data for 28 transiting systems with 10 < Vmag < 10.5, with an aim to update their known physical properties. The observed lightcurves have been analysed by implementing a state-of-the-art critical noise treatment algorithm to effectively reduce both time-correlated and un-correlated noise components, using sophisticated techniques like wavelet denoising and Gaussian-process regression.

Compared with the previous studies, the estimated transit parameters are found to be more precise for most of the targets, including a few cases where a larger space-based instrument like Spitzer, Kepler or CHEOPS has been used in the previous study.

The large volume of transit observations used for each target has also resulted in a more accurate estimation of the physical properties, as this overcomes any error in parameter estimations from bias present in a smaller volume of data. Thus, comparing with the literature values, statistically significant improvements in the known physical properties of several targeted systems have been reported from this work.

The large volume of transit timing information from the analyses was also used to search for Transit Timing Variation trends in these targets, which has resulted in no significant detection.

Suman Saha

Comments: 23 pages, 13 figures, 10 tables, Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:2407.20846 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2407.20846v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Suman Saha
[v1] Tue, 30 Jul 2024 14:24:50 UTC (3,021 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.20846
Astrobiology, Exoplanet,

Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Station Payload manager/space biologist, Away Teams, Journalist, Lapsed climber, Synaesthete, Na’Vi-Jedi-Freman-Buddhist-mix, ASL, Devon Island and Everest Base Camp veteran, (he/him) 🖖🏻