Tidal interactions between short-period exoplanets and their host stars drive orbital decay and have likely led to engulfment of planets by their stars. Precise transit timing surveys, with baselines now spanning decades for some planets, are directly detecting orbital decay for a handful of planets, with corroboration for planetary engulfment coming from independent lines of evidence. The large number of possible targets (hundreds of planets) means it is not feasible to continually observe all planets that might exhibit detectable tidal decay. For this work, we explored the properties of an exoplanet system that can maximize the likelihood for observing tidally driven transit timing variations.
Research Publications
- Jackson et al. (2023) “Metrics for Optimizing Searches for Tidally Decaying Exoplanets.” Astronomical Journal.