Astronomy Colloquium: Hot Jupiter Demographics with a Magnitude-Complete Sample from TESS

Mar

2025

3:30 pm – 4:30 pm

In Person (view details)

Featured Speaker(s): Samuel Yee - Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Astronomy Colloquium

Description

Hot Jupiter Demographics with a Magnitude-Complete Sample from TESS

Hot Jupiters were the first type of exoplanet to be discovered around Sun-like stars, but how exactly these giant planets arrived on their short-period orbits remains unclear. One reason for this is that our knowledge of the statistical distribution of hot Jupiter properties and that of their host stars is limited. Most hot Jupiters were discovered by a heterogeneous collection of ground-based transit surveys, making it difficult to construct a statistical sample suitable for demographic study. NASA's TESS mission, a uniform all-sky survey, presents the opportunity to revolutionize hot Jupiter demographics by unifying these previous planet searches. Over the past few years, we observed more than 200 planet candidates and confirmed 100 new hot Jupiters, and combined this with previously known objects to assemble a homogeneous, magnitude-limited sample of 400 transiting hot Jupiters. I will present the new statistical results from this survey, including the 4-sigma detection of a pile-up in the period distribution, the dependence of hot Jupiter occurrence on host star properties, and new evidence for the tidal decay and destruction of hot Jupiters on Gyr timescales. I will also discuss how our survey is also enabling new, detailed characterization of individual hot Jupiter systems with measurements of the alignment between their orbits and the stellar spin axis, and with detections of transit timing variations.