Observations of the Kepler Field with TESS: Predictions for Planet Yield and Observable Features

TL;DR

This paper predicts TESS's ability to detect and characterize planets in the Kepler field, highlighting its potential to find new planets, improve system measurements, and detect tidal decay in hot Jupiters.

Contribution

It models TESS's detection capabilities for Kepler planets, estimating detection probabilities and potential for system characterization and tidal decay detection.

Findings

TESS has >50% chance to detect 260 Kepler planets in one sector.

TESS can recover small numbers of rocky planets and multiple transits.

TESS may detect tidal decay in select hot Jupiter systems.

Abstract

We examine the ability of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to detect and improve our understanding of planetary systems in the Kepler field. By modeling the expected transits of all confirmed and candidate planets detected by Kepler as expected to be observed by TESS, we find that TESS has a greater than 50% chance of detecting 260 of these planets at the 3 sigma level in one sector of observations and an additional 120 planets in two sectors. Most of these are large planets in short orbits around their host stars, although a small number of rocky planets are expected to be recovered. Most of these systems have only one known transiting planet; in only ~5 percent of known multiply-transiting systems do we anticipate more than one planet to be recovered. When these planets are recovered, we expect TESS to be a powerful tool to characterizing transit timing variations. Using Kepler-88 (KOI-142) as an example, we show that TESS will improve measurements of planet-star mass ratios and orbital parameters, and significantly reduce the transit timing uncertainty in future years. Since TESS will be most sensitive to hot Jupiters, we research whether TESS will be able to detect tidal orbital decay in these systems. We find two confirmed planetary systems (Kepler-2 b and Kepler-13 b) and five candidate systems that will be good candidates to detect tidal decay.