Tag Archives: WASP-100b

More TESS phase curves of WASP exoplanets

Ian Wong et al have produced a new analysis of the TESS data on previously known WASP exoplanets. Their main interest is the “phase curve”, the variation of the light around the planet’s orbit.

Two examples are the systems WASP-72 and WASP-100:

In addition to the main transit (planet passing in front of the star) the phase curves show secondary eclipses (planet passing behind the star, at phase 0.5) and a sinusoidal variation due to the heated face of the planet. By modelling the phase-curves of these and other similar planets, Wong et al make the tentative suggestion that the hotter the planet (which can be measured from the depth of the secondary eclipse) the more reflective the atmosphere of the planet is.

Here’s a similar plot for WASP-30. Note, though, that the phase-curve variation peaks at phases 0.25 and 0.75, unlike those for WASP-72 and WASP-100. That’s because WASP-30b is not a planet but a brown dwarf, with a mass of 63 Jupiters. That is massive enough for its gravity to distort the host star into an ellipsoidal shape, and so in this system the variation of the light is caused by the varying projection of the distorted star around the orbit.

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.