Transit timing variations of five transiting planets

Abstract

4116 exoplanets have been discovered so far in 3062 planetary systems in total, 669 of which are multi-planet systems (http://exoplanet.eu, 2019-09-14). Finding a large, short orbital period planet transiting its star is a relatively easy task thanks to space born and ground based transit surveys. Whether they are the sole planets orbiting their host stars or they have companion planets is a worthy question to ask, because an average of ~1.34 planets per star is not a number expected from planet formation theories and a comparison with our own Solar System hosting at least 8 planets and many more bodies in planetary mass limits Transiting planets provide a unique opportunity to search for unseen additional bodies gravitationally bound to the system, which doesn't have to transit the host star. It is possible to detect the motion of the center of mass of the observed transiting planet host star duo due to the gravitational tugs of the unseen bodies from the Roemer delay. In order to achieve the goal, determination of the mid times of the transits of the planets in high precision and accuracy is a primary condition. These mid transit times have to be detrended from the orbital motion of the Earth about the Sun, which brings its own delay because it also changes the distance between the observed planet system and the Earth. Then potential periodic variations in the transit timings due to the so-called Light Travel Time Effect (LiTE) is searched. We present transit timing variations and update the ephemeris information of 5 transiting planets; HAT P 23b, WASP 103b, GJ 1214b, WASP 69b, and KELT 3b within this contribution. We have collected all the quality transit light curves of these exoplanets from the literature and observations of amateur astronomers made available through Exoplanet Transit Database (ETD), converted them to Dynamic Barycentric Julian days (BJD-TDB), constituted their Transit Timing Variation (TTV) diagrams, and updated their ephemeris information based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) analyses. Finally, we have carried out frequency analyses for all the planets in our sample and present the results.

ExoSelect and ExoRequest: Targets and Resources for efficiently observing Exoplanets

“…By providing the observing planning tools, this facilitates the capacity of students to contribute real meaningful data, at the most basic level of transit timing (e.g. Agol & Fabrycky, 2018;Baştürk et al, 2019;Steffen et al, 2007). When combined with other tools, this can provide capacity to delve even deeper into some original research.…”