Precise Transit Photometry Using TESS: Updated Physical Properties for 28 Exoplanets Around Bright Stars
Suman Saha
TL;DR
This paper addresses the challenge of delivering precise exoplanet properties for known transiting planets around bright stars using TESS transit photometry. It employs a two-stage noise treatment—wavelet denoising for time-uncorrelated noise and Gaussian-process regression for time-correlated noise—coupled with a Mandel-Agol transit model and MCMC sampling to derive direct transit parameters and, with literature RVs and stellar parameters, the physical properties of 28 exoplanets. The results show substantially improved precision over prior ground-based and space-based studies, particularly for $b$, $R_p/R_{star}$, and $a/R_{star}$ across the sample. The updated properties enable more accurate studies of planetary structure, evolution, and potential atmospheric characterization for bright-star systems, and demonstrate a scalable approach for future large-scale exoplanet surveys.
Abstract
The TESS follow-up of a large number of known transiting exoplanets provide unique opportunity to study their physical properties more precisely. Being a space-based telescope, the TESS observations are devoid of any noise component resulting from the interference of Earth's atmosphere. TESS also provides a better probability to observe subsequent transit events owing to its longer uninterrupted time-series observations compared to the ground-based telescopes. Especially, for the exoplanets around bright host-stars, TESS time-series observations provides high SNR lightcurves, which can be used for higher precision studies for these exoplanets. In this work, I have studied the TESS transit photometric follow-up observations of 28 exoplanets around bright stars with $V_{mag}\le$10. The already high SNR lightcurves from TESS have been further processed with a critical noise treatment algorithm, using the wavelet denoising and the Gaussian-process regression techniques, to effectively reduce the noise components both correlated and uncorrelated in time, which were then used to estimate the physical properties of these exoplanets. The study has resulted in very precise values for the physical properties of the target exoplanets, with the improvements in precision being significant for most of the cases compared to the previous studies. Also, since a comparatively large number of transit lightcurves from TESS observations were used to estimate these physical properties for each of the target exoplanets, which removes any bias due to the lack of sufficient datasets, these updated physical properties can be considered extremely accurate and reliable for future studies.