From TESS single transits to well-characterized warm Jupiters

Abstract

<p>Warm Jupiters provide a unique opportunity to better understand the formation and evolution of planetary systems. Their atmospheric properties remain largely unaltered by the impact of the host star, and their orbital arrangement reflects a different, and less extreme, migrational history compared to close-in objects. Warm Jupiters are known to cover a wide range of eccentricities but it is unclear which are the dominant formation pathways to explain this observation. Increasing the sample of long-period exoplanets with known radii is thus crucial. In this talk, I report the results of a survey set out to find transiting giants with orbital periods between 20 and 200 days. We selected 50 stars which show a single transit in one TESS sector (27 day baseline) and followed them with ground-based photometric and radial velocity facilities (e.g. NGTS, HARPS). After one year of observations, we report the detection and characterization of ten new transiting warm Jupiters, increasing by 50% the number of known warm Jupiters with precise masses and radii. We infer the metal enrichment of the newly discovered warm Jupiters and explore their influence on the mass-metallicity correlation of giant planets. The growing sample of warm Jupiters allows us to interpret these systems in terms of planet formation models. Finally, these targets orbit bright stars and thus are ideal for follow-up studies of the planetary atmosphere and the system' spin-orbit alignment. This work is a stepping stone for PLATO, as identification and follow up of single transit events will be key in order to detect transiting Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone of Sun-like stars.</p>