Understanding and predicting cadence effects in the characterization of exoplanet transits

Autor: Julio Hernandez Camero, Cynthia S K Ho, Vincent Van Eylen
Rok vydání: 2023
Předmět:
Zdroj: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 520:4103-4117
ISSN: 1365-2966
0035-8711
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stad408
Popis: We investigate the effect of observing cadence on the precision of radius ratio values obtained from transit light curves by performing uniform Markov Chain Monte Carlo fits of 46 exoplanets observed by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) in multiple cadences. We find median improvements of almost 50% when comparing fits to 20s and 120s cadence light curves to 1800s cadence light curves, and of 37% when comparing 600s cadence to 1800s cadence. Such improvements in radius precision are important, for example, to precisely constrain the properties of the radius valley or to characterize exoplanet atmospheres. We also implement a numerical Information Analysis to predict the precision of parameter estimates for different observing cadences. We tested this analysis on our sample and found it reliably predicts the effect of shortening observing cadence with errors in the predicted % precision of
15 pages, 9 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS
Databáze: OpenAIRE