Probing the Possible Causes of the Transit Timing Variation for TrES-2b in TESS Era

TL;DR

This study analyzes transit timing variations of TrES-2b using TESS and ground data, finding evidence for orbital decay likely caused by tidal dissipation, with implications for stellar tidal properties.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of long-term TTVs for TrES-2b, suggesting orbital decay as the primary cause and estimating the stellar tidal quality factor.

Findings

No short-term TTVs detected.

Orbital period shrinking at -5.58 ms/yr.

Stellar tidal quality factor estimated at 9900.

Abstract

Nowadays, transit timing variations (TTVs) are proving to be a very valuable tool in exoplanetary science to detect exoplanets by observing variations in transit times. To study the transit timing variation of the hot Jupiter, TrES-2b, we have combined 64 high-quality transit light curves from all seven sectors of NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) along with 60 best-quality light curves from the ground-based facility Exoplanet Transit Database (ETD) and 106 mid-transit times from the previous works. From the precise transit timing analysis, we have observed a significant improvement in the orbital ephemerides, but we did not detect any short period TTVs that might result from an additional body. The inability to detect short-term TTVs further motivates us to investigate long-term TTVs, which might be caused by orbital decay, apsidal precession, Applegate mechanism, and $R{\phi}$mer effect and the orbital decay appeared to be a better explanation for the observed TTV with $\Delta BIC$ = 4.32. The orbital period of the hot Jupiter TrES-2b appears to be shrinking at a rate of $-5.58 \pm 1.81$ ms/yr. Assuming this decay is primarily caused by tidal dissipation within the host star, we have subsequently calculated the stellar tidal quality factor value to be 9900, which is 2 to 3 orders of magnitude smaller than the theoretically predicted values for other hot-Jupiter systems and its low value indicates more efficient tidal dissipation within the host star. Additional precise photometric and radial velocity observations are required to pinpoint the cause of the change in the orbital period.