CHEOPS, the CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite is ESA’s Small-class mission dedicated to recording transits of exoplanets. A new paper led by Luca Borsato presents some early observations of transits of WASP, KELT and HATnet planets.

Here, for example, are the lightcurves of two transits of WASP-8b, both plotted against phase.

The paper focuses on the transit timing, which can be as good as timing a transit to an accuracy of 13 to 16 seconds, depending on the brightness of the host star and the amount of transit covered by the observations.

One aim of such work is to look for variations in the timing of transits, caused by the gravitational perturbations of additional unseen planets in the system.