The influence of hypothetical exomoons on planetary thermal phase curves

TL;DR

This study models how exomoons influence planetary thermal phase curves, highlighting their potential detectability and impact on interpreting planetary temperature distributions, especially for short-period exoplanets.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical framework for simulating exomoon effects on thermal phase curves and assesses their detectability through mutual transits and occultations.

Findings

Exomoons cause detectable variations in thermal phase curves.

Mutual occultations can reach depths of up to 20-100 ppm.

Ignoring exomoons can bias planetary temperature estimates.

Abstract

More than 200 moons exist in our Solar System, yet no exomoon has been confirmed to date. While the innermost two planets of the Solar System lack natural satellites and most studies favour the existence of exomoons around long-period planets, some theoretical studies that take tidal dissipation, orbital decay, and migration processes into account suggest that exomoons may survive around short-period exoplanets. We investigated the impact of exomoons on planetary thermal phase curves and assessed their detectability within a theoretical framework. We simulated the thermal phase curves of exomoon-exoplanet systems, including mutual transits and occultations, and explored their dependence on planetary orbital periods across a wide range of systems. Close-in airless exomoons maintain large day-night temperature contrasts, amplifying the thermal phase-curve signal of the system. When the exomoon transits or is occulted by the exoplanet, the transit depth varies with the planetary phase, and the occultation depth varies with the exomoon's phase. The maximum occultation depth can reach $\sim$ 20 ppm for long-period systems. For short-period planets, the signal can reach up to $\sim$100 ppm, although such configurations may not be dynamically stable over long timescales. If exomoons are not accounted for, the planetary temperature distribution retrieved from observed thermal phase curves may overestimate the planetary day-night temperature contrast and underestimate the planetary horizontal heat transport. In principle, the periodic exomoon-exoplanet mutual occultation signal could be extracted using methods such as box-fitting least squares, providing a framework for future observational studies and instrument planning.