Code of conduct

Upload instructions

What is exoplanet-talks.org?

News

The TESS Mission is a watershed moment for exoplanet science. In addition to the impressive yield of new planet candidates, TESS opens up exciting avenues of study for known planets. Following the legacy of similar work carried out with Kepler data, we take advantage of the continuous, long-baseline photometry provided by the TESS mission to study the full-orbit light curves of transiting systems. From these visible wavelength phase curves, we can place constraints on such fundamental physical quantities as: (1) the planet’s dayside temperature and Bond albedo, through measurement of the secondary eclipse depth in the TESS band (2) the efficiency of day-night recirculation of incident stellar irradiation, via the amplitude and phase shift of the planet’s atmospheric brightness modulation across the orbit and (3) the response of the host star to the mutual star-planet gravitational interaction, which is expressed in the phase curve signal via Doppler boosting of the star’s light and tidal distortion of the stellar surface. Throughout the two-year Primary Mission, we have carried out a systematic and uniform light curve analysis of all known transiting systems with predicted detectable secondary eclipses and/or phase curve signals. Several high signal-to-noise phase curves have already been published by our group, including WASP-18b (Shporer et al. 2019), WASP-19b (Wong et al. 2020a), WASP-121b (Daylan et al. 2020, in revision), and KELT-9b (Wong et al. 2020b, in revision see accompanying plot). In this talk, we present an overview of our study, with a focus on both benchmark individual systems and broader trends across the dozens of analyzed systems. We also compare these results with the predictions of theoretical phase curve modeling, explore the prospects for intensive atmospheric characterization with future ground- and space-based facilities, and discuss fruitful opportunities for follow-up study as TESS revisits these systems in the Extended Mission.

Ian Wong: Systematic phase curve study of known transiting systems from the TESS primary mission