TEPCat: The Transiting Extrasolar Planet Catalogue

Abstract

Transiting extrasolar planets are extraordinarily valuable for understanding the characteristics and formation of planets, because they are the only exoplanets whose physical and orbital properties can be measured to high precision. Thousands are now known, and it is important to maintain a database of them for use by the scientific community. TEPCat performs this task: it is a critical compilation of the physical and observable properties of the known transiting planetary systems. This work introduces the motivation for TEPCat, its scope, contents, and implementation. Example plots of interesting quantities are constructed. The classification of planets and of the eclipse features in their light curves is discussed. TEPCat is maintained and freely available online at https://www.astro.keele.ac.uk/jkt/tepcat/

Figures (9)

• Figure S1: Bar chart showing the number of modifications to TEPCat per month since late 2013, compiled from the News pages.
• Figure S2: Plots of the number of known TEPs as a function of time. The upper panel shows discoveries made using data from ground-based telescopes. The lower panel shows all discoveries, plus subdivisions into those from the Kepler, TESS, K2 and CoRoT space missions. The keys give the symbols and colours used for each line.
• Figure S3: Sky positions of the known transiting systems, in the equatorial coordinate system. The upper and lower panels show TEPs discovered using ground-based and space-based data, respectively. The point sizes are larger for brighter stars, with $V$-band apparent magnitudes ranging from 5.57 to 18.97. The colours show which survey dataset led to the discovery, as indicated in the keys across the tops of the panels. The grey dashed line indicates the galactic plane.
• Figure S4: Mass-radius plot of the objects in TEPCat. Blue points mark the primary objects (stars) and red points the secondary objects (TEPs and BDs). In the case of circumbinary planets the primary star in the binary systems is taken to be the primary object. The properties of largest solar-system objects are shown in green (without error bars) for illustration.
• Figure S5: Masses versus semimajor axes of the relative orbit for the secondary components of systems within TEPCat. The points are colour-coded according to host star mass, the most massive (2.38$\,{\rm M}_\odot$) being blue and the least massive (0.090$\,{\rm M}_\odot$) being red. Secondary components of unknown mass or with only an upper limit on their mass are not plotted.