The impact of photospheric brightness field on exoplanetary transit timings and the TTV excess of HD 189733 b

TL;DR

This study models the star's surface brightness as a random field to assess its effect on exoplanet transit timing variations, finding it explains only a small part of the observed excess noise in HD 189733 b.

Contribution

It introduces a statistical model of stellar surface brightness to quantify its impact on transit timing variations, providing upper limits on brightness fluctuation parameters.

Findings

Photospheric brightness field accounts for about 10 seconds of TTV excess.

Remaining TTV excess likely due to other sources.

Upper limit on brightness variation parameters is approximately 0.01.

Abstract

We consider the issue of excessive TTV noise observed for the exoplanet HD 189733 b. Trying to explain it through the host star photospheric activity, we model the stellar surface brightness as a random field, then characterize statistical properties of the resulting transit signal perturbation and compute individual corrections to transit timings uncertainties. We find that possible effect of the photospheric brightness field can explain only a minor portion ($\sim 10$ s) of the observed ($\sim 70$ s) TTV excess of HD 189733, suggesting that the rest should be attributed to other sources. Regarding the photospheric pattern, we place an upper limit of $\sim 0.01$ on the combination $\varepsilon_{\rm cell} r_{\rm cell}$, where $\varepsilon_{\rm cell}$ is the relative magnitude of brightness variations, and $r_{\rm cell}$ is the geometric cellularity scale (relative to star radius).