The TESS mission will survey the entire sky for new transiting exoplanets, and as a by-product will produce space-quality lightcurves of all the WASP exoplanet systems. The first such paper has just appeared on arXiv, where Avi Shporer et al report on the TESS lightcurve of WASP-18.

WASP-18b is the most massive planet found by WASP, a 12-Jupiter-mass planet in a very tight orbit lasting only 0.94 days. This means it has the strongest planet–star tidal interaction of any known planetary system, such that the planet’s gravity gives rise to large tidal bulges on the host star. Here are the TESS data folded on the orbital cycle:

The out-of-transit data are clearly not flat (shown on a larger scale in the middle panel), and show the “ellipsoidal modulation” caused by the tidal bulges on the star. The heated face of the planet is also eclipsed by the star at phase 0.5, producing a secondary eclipse.

By analysing the lightcurve the authors conclude that very little heat is being redistributed from the heated face of the planet. Strong winds could carry heat to the un-irradiated cooler hemisphere, but there is little sign of this in the data.

So far the results of the analysis are in line with theoretical expectations, though the work points to the potential for similar analyses of other previously-known exoplanet systems.