Precise Transit Photometry Using TESS II: Revisiting 28 Additional Transiting Systems With Updated Physical Properties

TL;DR

This study refines the physical properties of 28 transiting exoplanets using TESS follow-up data and advanced noise reduction techniques, achieving more precise measurements than previous studies, but finds no significant transit timing variations.

Contribution

It applies a novel noise treatment algorithm to TESS data for 28 systems, improving the accuracy of physical property estimations over prior work.

Findings

More precise transit parameters for most targets.

Significant improvements in physical property estimates.

No significant transit timing variations detected.

Abstract

Precise physical properties of the known transiting exoplanets are essential for their precise atmospheric characterization using modern and upcoming instruments. Leveraging the large volume of high SNR photometric follow-up data from TESS, highly precise physical properties can be estimated for these systems, especially for those discovered using ground-based instruments prior to the TESS mission. In this work, I have used the publicly available TESS follow-up data for 28 transiting systems with 10 $<$ V$_{mag}$ $<$ 10.5, with an aim to update their known physical properties. The observed lightcurves have been analysed by implementing a state-of-the-art critical noise treatment algorithm to effectively reduce both time-correlated and un-correlated noise components, using sophisticated techniques like wavelet denoising and Gaussian-process regression. Compared with the previous studies, the estimated transit parameters are found to be more precise for most of the targets, including a few cases where a larger space-based instrument like Spitzer, Kepler or CHEOPS has been used in the previous study. The large volume of transit observations used for each target has also resulted in a more accurate estimation of the physical properties, as this overcomes any error in parameter estimations from bias present in a smaller volume of data. Thus, comparing with the literature values, statistically significant improvements in the known physical properties of several targeted systems have been reported from this work. The large volume of transit timing information from the analyses was also used to search for Transit Timing Variation trends in these targets, which has resulted in no significant detection.