Tag Archives: exoplanet transits

CHEOPS observations of WASP transits

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.

TESS observes the WASP-148 system

The hot Jupiter WASP-148b is rather unusual, since it has a sibling planet, WASP-148c in a 35-day orbit (Hébrard et al. 2020). The system was recently observed by TESS leading to a new paper by Gracjan Maciejewski et al. (Nicolaus Copernicus University and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía).

The gravitational tug of the outer planet WASP-148c perturbs the orbit of the hot Jupiter WASP-148b. Here are deviations in the timings of the hot-Jupiter’s transit (the green points are new timings from TESS, the blue points are from observations from the Sierra Nevada Observatory, the red line is a model based on the masses and orbits of the planets):

The great boon of transit-timing information is that it leads to measurements of the masses of the planets, which can be combined with radial-velocity measurements to give a better overall characterisation of the system.

Maciejewski et al. also searched the TESS data for transits of the outer planet. The yellow areas are the predicted time of transit, should the planet’s orbital inclination be sufficiently high (the red line is a model showing the predicted depth of the transit; the black triangle marks a transit of the hot Jupiter WASP-148b). There is no indication that WASP-148c transits.

First results from ESA’s Cheops: WASP-189b

ESA’s Cheops satellite (the Characterising Exoplanet Satellite) started observing this year, and ESA has just put out a press release announcing its first science results. Cheops looked at transits and occultations of WASP-189b, an ultra-hot Jupiter in a polar orbit transiting a bright star.

“Only a handful of planets are known to exist around stars this hot, and this system is by far the brightest,” says Monika Lendl of the University of Geneva, Switzerland, lead author of the new study. “WASP-189b is also the brightest hot Jupiter that we can observe as it passes in front of or behind its star, making the whole system really intriguing.”

At a visual magnitude of V = 6.6, WASP-189 is the brightest host star of all the WASP planets. The discovery of the transiting hot Jupiter was announced in 2018 in a paper led by David Anderson. The exceptional nature of WASP-189 thus made it a prime target for Cheops.

The Cheops study shows that: “the star itself is interesting – it’s not perfectly round, but larger and cooler at its equator than at the poles, making the poles of the star appear brighter,” says Dr Lendl. “It’s spinning around so fast that it’s being pulled outwards at its equator!”

“This first result from Cheops is hugely exciting: it is early definitive evidence that the mission is living up to its promise in terms of precision and performance,” says Kate Isaak, Cheops project scientist at ESA.

Press coverage has included articles in CNN, CTV, the International Business Times, The Sun, The Mirror, The Daily Mail, The Express and over 30 other news sites.

WASP-100 and WASP-126 in TESS Sectors 1 to 4

As TESS continues its all-sky survey it will produce high-quality data containing lots of transits for all the WASP planets. This is especially so for planets near the ecliptic poles, which TESS will observe over many sectors. With TESS Sector 4 data recently released, here are some plots borrowed from David Kipping on Twitter.

The lower plots show the variations in transit timing (O–C is the difference between the observed timing and the timing calculated from an ephemeris).

These plots seem to show something that I’ve suspected for a while, namely that there are correlated deviations in the transit timings, meaning that if one O–C value is slightly early (or late) then the next one is more likely to be the same. Such deviations can also be larger than expected given the errors (the quoted chi-squared value for WASP-100b of 44 for 32 degrees of freedom tells us that the error bars don’t fully account for the variations).

This must be the result of stellar activity, magnetic variations on the surface of the star such as star-spots and faculae. Any deviation from a smooth stellar profile can then alter the transit profile.

Properly accounting for such effects will be important for two sorts of study. The first is looking for “transit-timing variations”, changes in the transit time of a planet caused by variations in its orbit owing to the gravitational perturbations of another planet. The second is looking for long-term changes in the orbital period, such as the inward-spiral decay of the orbit predicted to be caused by tidal interactions of the planet and its host star. The literature contains marginal claims of the latter effect that might be better explained as the effect of magnetic activity of the host star.

Precise masses for the WASP-47 exoplanetary system

In the discovery paper the exoplanet WASP-47b was introduced to the world with the description: “With an orbital period of 4.16 d, a mass of 1.14 M_Jup and a radius of 1.15 R_Jup, WASP-47b is an entirely typical hot Jupiter”.

And it did appear to be entirely typical until Juliette Becker et al looked at K2 lightcurves and found two more planets, a super-Earth orbiting inside the hot Jupiter (WASP-47e in a 0.79-d orbit) and a Neptune orbiting just outside it (WASP-47d in a 9-d orbit). Around the same time Neveu-VanMalle et al announced long-term monitoring showing another Jupiter-mass planet (WASP-47c), this one in a much wider orbit of 580 days. Thus WASP-47 was shown to host a whole exoplanetary system, one that is so-far unique.

Since then WASP-47 has been observed intensively in order to measure the planet masses and investigate the dynamics of the exoplanetary system. The state of play is now reported by Andrew Vanderburg et al. The planets’ host star is tugged around by the gravitational pull of the orbiting planets, leading to the following cyclical variations in the observed radial velocities:

Combining all the information, Vanderburg et al deduce that the innermost “super-Earth”, WASP-47e, is not dense enough to be made only of rock. Instead it likely has a liquid or gaseous envelope (possibly water or steam) surrounding an Earth-like core. That is unlike other ultra-short-period super-Earths which appear to be fully rocky.

From modelling the dynamical history of the system Vanderburg et al also deduce that the outermost planet, WASP-47c, is likely in an orbit that is in the same plane as those of the inner planets. If this were not the case then the system would not be stable. Thus they conclude that the likelihood that WASP-47c also transits its star, as seen from Earth, is relatively high, which should motivate a campaign to look for those transits.

One we missed: EPIC 228735255b

At WASP we routinely “reverse engineer” transiting exoplanets announced from other surveys to see whether we could have found them. Since the K2 mission has vastly better photometry it will find anything we’ve missed in K2 fields.

An interesting case is EPIC 228735255b, a transiting hot Jupiter in a 6.57-day orbit around a V = 12.5, G5 star, newly announced by a team led by Helen Giles, a PhD student at the University of Geneva.

In principle this planet should be within the reach of the WASP survey. However, at V = 12.5 it is at the faint end of the survey, and with a period of 6.57 days (fairly long for hot Jupiters) fewer transits get covered. Further, the WASP camera use large pixels, in order to get wide-field coverage, and for this object there is another star on the edge of our photometric aperture (see left), which degrades our photometry. Lastly, at a declination of −09 it is just below the sky covered by SuperWASP-North and so we have data only from WASP-South, principally 4600 data points from 2009 and 5700 data points from 2010.

Nevertheless, the transit was detected in WASP data, found by our standard transit-search algorithms (the WASP transit period is 6.5692 days, which compares with the Giles et al period of 6.5693 days, where the match affirms that our detection is real).

The plots show the search periodogram, showing a clear “spike” at the transit period and at twice the transit period, and (below) the WASP data folded on the transit period (transit is at phase 0).

The problem is that there is always a lot of “red noise” in WASP data, and picking candidates always involves a judgement call as to whether the signal is real. This one was just not quite convincing enough for us. The folded light curve looks pretty ratty, and the individual transit lightcurves are not particularly convincing. It had been flagged as a possible candidate, but rated as not secure enough a detection to send to the radial-velocity follow-up teams. Perhaps WASP detections might be more reliable than we thought!

While the WASP data are now superseded by the K2 photometry, it is worth recording the WASP transit ephemeris, which is period = 6.56919 (+/− 0.00036) days, epoch HJD = 2455151.1052 (+/− 0.0084), and transit width 3.56 hrs (which results from transit features spanning HJD 2454914 to 2455348).

Since these observations are from March 2009 to May 2010, they greatly extend the baseline of the Giles et al photometry, which covers 2016 July to 2017 March, and so will help refine the ephemeris to assist future observations.

The imminent TESS mission will find all the hot Jupiters that we’ve missed over the whole sky (whereas K2 is confined to the ecliptic plane), but will observe regions of sky for only a limited period and so give poor ephemerides. The above comparison suggests that WASP data will still be of valuable in being able to greatly improve the ephemerides for many TESS finds.

Gaia detects transits of WASP exoplanets

ESA’s Gaia satellite is a €740-million mission to map a billion stars in our galaxy. By observing repeatedly with unprecedented astrometric precision it is measuring the parallaxes, and thus the distances, of hundreds of millions of stars, and so mapping out the 3-D structure of our galaxy.

Gaia can detect exoplanets in two ways, first by astrometry (measuring the position of a star), so detecting the wobble in the star’s location caused by an orbiting massive planet, and secondly by the transit method, detecting the dip in the light of a star caused by a transiting planet.

The Gaia team have just announced the first detections of exoplanet transits, by looking at the accumulated Gaia data on two already-known WASP planets.

The plot shows a year’s worth of Gaia data of the star WASP-19, folded on the 0.79-day orbital period of the planet WASP-19b (the three different panels are the star’s magnitude in three different colours). The coverage is sparse — it is designed for astrometric measurements, not for recording lightcurves — but one observation was made in-transit, demonstrating that Gaia can indeed detect exoplanet transits.

The ESA/Gaia team have also looked at the data on WASP-98, and again detect the transit of WASP-98b.

Exoplanet cloudiness from transit lightcurves?

An interesting new paper by von Paris et al has explored the effect of the cloudiness of a planet on transit lightcurves. If a planet were cloudy on one limb, but clear on the other limb, then that could make the transit slightly asymmetric. The authors show that, in principle, this effect could be detectable with good-enough quality lightcurves.

An apparent shift in the transit:

Would then lead to residuals, relative to a “perfect” transit, looking like:

The authors then claim a possible detection of such an effect in the hot Jupiter HAT-P-7b.

This might open up a new way of exploring the atmospheres of exoplanets. Whether this can ever be done reliably, however, is debatable. A big assumption in the authors’ simulations is that the star being transited is uniform. However, we know that stars are usually magnetically active and so are patchy. Star spots and bright patches on the star are likely to have a greater effect on the transit profile than the cloudiness of the planet’s atmosphere. Still, the effect is worth exploring, particularly for planets transiting magnetically quiet stars.

WASP Planets

Transiting exoplanets from the Wide Angle Search for Planets