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Published August 2022 | Published + Accepted Version
Journal Article Open

Determining Which Binary Component Hosts the TESS Transiting Planet

Abstract

The NASA TESS mission has discovered many transiting planets orbiting bright nearby stars, and high-resolution imaging studies have revealed that a number of these exoplanet hosts reside in binary or multiple star systems. In such systems, transit observations alone cannot determine which star in the binary system actually hosts the orbiting planet. The knowledge of which star the planet orbits is necessary for determining accurate physical properties for the planet, especially its true radius and mean bulk density. We derived the mean stellar densities for the components of 23 binary systems using the light curve transit shape and the binary flux ratio from speckle imaging, then tested the consistency with stellar models to determine which component is the host star. We found that 70% of the TESS transiting planets in our sample orbit the primary star.

Additional Information

© 2022. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. Received 2022 April 15; revised 2022 June 3; accepted 2022 June 3; published 2022 July 18. K.V.L. is supported by an appointment to the NASA Postdoctoral Program at the NASA Ames Research Center, administered by Oak Ridge Associated Universities under contract with NASA. This paper includes data collected with the TESS mission obtained from the MAST data archive at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). Funding for the TESS mission is provided by the NASA Explorer Program. STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 526555. This work also made use of the Exoplanet Follow-up Observation Program website and EXOFAST (Eastman et al. 2013) tool provided by the NASA Exoplanet Archive, which is operated by the California Institute of Technology under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under the Exoplanet Exploration Program. Facilities: TESS - , SOAR - , Gemini North - , Gemini South - , WIYN. - Software: Astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013, 2018), celerite (Foreman-Mackey et al. 2017; Foreman-Mackey 2018), EXOFAST (Eastman et al. 2013), Matplotlib (Hunter 2007), NumPy (Harris et al. 2020), SciPy (Virtanen et al. 2020)

Attached Files

Published - Lester_2022_AJ_164_56.pdf

Accepted Version - 2206.02825.pdf

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Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 24, 2023