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A poorly understood feature of the hot Jupiter population is the observation that many of these planets have radii that are larger than expected from theoretical models; they are ‘inflated’. Whilst the correlation between hot Jupiter inflation and incident flux is well-documented (e.g. Laughlin et al. 2011; Weiss et al. 2013; Thorngren & Fortney 2018), it is clear that this relationship is just one piece of a larger puzzle.

In this talk I discuss the discovery of four new hot Jupiters with the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS), a ground-based survey located at ESO’s Paranal site which searches for small transiting exoplanets around bright stars. NGTS-15b, NGTS-16b, NGTS-17b and NGTS-18b all occupy a region of parameter space in which planetary inflation mechanisms are believed to become effective. Using statistical studies, we discerned whether the planets show signs of inflation, and compared our results to current Bayesian inflationary models. While these models describe the general inflated hot Jupiter population well, we suggest that the inclusion of additional hyperparameters to describe latent factors, such as heavy element fraction, would not only aid the accurate prediction of individual radii, but could also deepen our understanding of the additional physical processes which give rise to inflated planets.

NGTS 15b, 16b, 17b and 18b: four hot Jupiters from the Next Generation Transit Survey