Homogeneous Transit Timing Analyses of Ten Exoplanet Systems

TL;DR

This study homogeneously analyzes transit timings of ten exoplanets to detect potential variations, refining orbital parameters and setting constraints on tidal dissipation without finding significant TTVs.

Contribution

It provides the most precise transit timing measurements for these exoplanets and offers a homogeneous analysis framework for future TTV studies.

Findings

No statistically significant TTVs detected.

Refined orbital ephemerides for all ten exoplanets.

Lower limits on stellar tidal quality factors derived.

Abstract

We study the transit timings of 10 exoplanets in order to investigate potential Transit Timing Variations (TTVs) in them. We model their available ground-based light curves, some presented here and others taken from the literature, and homogeneously measure the mid-transit times. We statistically compare our results with published values and find that the measurement errors agree. However, in terms of recovering the possible frequencies, homogeneous sets can be found to be more useful, of which no statistically relevant example has been found for the planets in our study. We corrected the ephemeris information of all ten planets we studied and provide these most precise light elements as references for future transit observations with space-borne and ground-based instruments. We found no evidence for secular or periodic changes in the orbital periods of the planets in our sample, including the ultra-short period WASP-103 b, whose orbit is expected to decay on an observable timescale. Therefore, we derive the lower limits for the reduced tidal quality factors (Q$^{\prime}_{\star}$) for the host stars based on best fitting quadratic functions to their timing data. We also present a global model of all available data for WASP-74 b, which has a Gaia parallax-based distance value ~25% larger than the published value.