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The transit method of exoplanet discovery and characterization has enabled numerous breakthroughs in exoplanetary science. These include measurements of planetary radii, mass-radius relationships, stellar obliquities, bulk density constraints on interior models, and transmission spectroscopy as a means to study planetary atmospheres. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has added to the exoplanet inventory by observing a significant fraction of the celestial sphere, including many stars already known to host exoplanets. Here we describe the science extraction from TESS observations of known exoplanet hosts during the primary mission. These include transit detection of known exoplanets, discovery of additional exoplanets, detection of phase signatures and secondary eclipses, transit ephemeris refinement, and asteroseismology as a means to improve stellar and planetary parameters. We provide the statistics of TESS known host observations during Cycle 1 and 2, and present several examples of TESS photometry for known host stars observed with a long baseline. We outline the major discoveries from observations of known hosts during the primary mission. Finally, we describe the case for further observations of known exoplanet hosts during the TESS extended mission and the expected science yield.

Observed transit timing variation (TTV) potentially reveals the period decay caused by star-planet tidal interaction which can explain the orbital migration of hot Jupiters. We report the TTV of XO-3b, using TESS observed timings and archival timings. We generate a photometric pipeline to produce light curves from raw TESS images and find the difference between our pipeline and TESS PDC is negligible for timing analysis. TESS timing presents a shift of 17.6 minutes (80 σ ), earlier than the prediction from the previous ephemeris. The best linear fit for all timings available gives a Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) value of 439. A quadratic function is a better model with a BIC of 56. The period derivative obtained from a quadratic function is −6.2 × 10 −9 ± 2.9 × 10 −10 per orbit, indicating an orbital decay timescale 1.4 Myr. We find that the orbital period decay can be well explained by tidal interaction. The “modified tidal quality factor” Q p ′ would be 1.8 × 10 4 ± 8 × 10 2 if we assume the decay is due to the tide in the planet; whereas Q * ′ would be 1.5 × 10 5 ± 6 × 10 3 if tidal dissipation is predominantly in the star. The precession model is another possible origin to explain the observed TTVs. We note that the follow-up observations of occultation timing and radial velocity monitoring are needed for fully discriminating the different models.

The photometric light curves of BRITE satellites were examined through a machine learning technique to investigate whether there are possible exoplanets moving around nearby bright stars. Focusing on different transit periods, several convolutional neural networks were constructed to search for transit candidates. The convolutional neural networks were trained with synthetic transit signals combined with BRITE light curves until the accuracy rate was higher than 99.7%. Our method could efficiently lead to a small number of possible transit candidates. Among these ten candidates, two of them, HD37465, and HD186882 systems, were followed up through future observations with a higher priority. The codes of convolutional neural networks employed in this study are publicly available at http://www.phys.nthu.edu.tw/~jiang/BRITE2020YehJiangCNN.tar.gz.

The distribution of period ratios for 580 known two-planet systems is apparently nonuniform, with several sharp peaks and troughs. In particular, the vicinity of the 2:1 commensurability seems to have a deficit of systems. Using Monte Carlo simulations and an empirically inferred population distribution of period ratios, we prove that this apparent dearth of near-resonant systems is not statistically significant. The excess of systems with period ratios in the wider vicinity of the 2:1 resonance is significant, however. Long-term WHFast integrations of a synthetic two-planet system on a grid period ratios from 1.87 through 2.12 reveal that the eccentricity and inclination exchange mechanism between non-resonant planets represents the orbital evolution very well in all cases, except at the exact 2:1 mean motion resonance. This resonance destroys the orderly exchange of eccentricity, while the exchange of inclination still takes place. Additional simulations of the Kepler-113 system on a grid of initial inclinations show that the secular periods of eccentricity and inclination variations are well fitted by a simple hyperbolic cosine function of the initial mutual inclination. We further investigate the six known two-planet systems with period ratios within 2% of the exact 2:1 resonance (TOI-216, KIC 5437945, Kepler-384, HD 82943, HD 73526, HD 155358) on a grid of initial inclinations and for two different initial periastron longitudes corresponding to the aligned and anti-aligned states. All these systems are found to be long-term stable except HD 73526, which is likely a false positive. The periodic orbital momentum exchange is still at work in some of these systems, albeit with much shorter cycling periods of a few years.

We investigate the question whether or not the orbitals of exoplanets follow the symmetry-governed sequence found by Barut from the dynamical group of the Kepler problem. In particular, we consider their star distances, periods, and velocities. Previous studies have shown the validity of this regularity for our solar system, and for some selected exoplanet systems. Here, we study all the systems which are known with four or more planets. A remarkable result is found: 63 out of 100 systems show a better agreement between the theory and observation than our solar system. We discuss the relation between the symmetry-inspired transformations and the generalized Titius–Bode (gTB) rule. It turns out that the gTB rule, which has been considered purely empirical, can be obtained from the transformations corresponding to the dynamical group of the Kepler problem.

Exoplanet detection surveys revealed the existence of numerous multi-planetary systems packed close to their stability limit. In this proceeding, we review the mechanism driving the instability of compact systems, originally published in (Petit et al. 2020). Compact systems dynamics are dominated by the interactions between resonances involving triplets of planets. The complex network of three-planet mean motion resonances drives a slow chaotic semi-major axes diffusion, leading to a fast and destructive scattering phase. This model reproduces quantitatively the instability timescale found numerically. We can observe signpost of this process on exoplanet systems architecture. The critical spacing ensuring stability scales as the planet-to star mass ratio to the power 1/4. It explains why the Hill radius is not an adapted measure of dynamical compactness of exoplanet systems, particularly for terrestrial planets. We also provide some insight on the theoretical tools developped in the original work and how they can be of interest in other problems.

The question of whether the solar distances of the planetary system follow a regular sequence was raised by Kepler more than 400 years ago. He could not prove his expectation, inasmuch as the planetary orbits are not transformed into each other by the regular polyhedra. In 1989, Barut proposed another relation, which was inspired by the hidden symmetry of the Kepler problem. It was found to be approximately valid for our Solar System. Here, we investigate if exoplanet systems follow this rule. We find that the symmetry-governed sequence is valid in several systems. It is very unlikely that the observed regularity is by chance; therefore, our findings give support to Kepler’s guess, although with a different transformation rule.

The presence of a planetary companion around its host star has been repeatedly linked with stellar properties, affecting the likelihood of substellar object formation and stability in the protoplanetary disc, thus presenting a key challenge in exoplanet science. Furthermore, abundance and stellar parameter data sets tend to be incomplete, which limits the ability to infer distributional characteristics harnessing the entire data set. This work aims to develop a methodology using machine learning (ML) and multi-objective optimization for reliable imputation for subsequent comparison tests and host star recommendation. It integrates fuzzy clustering for imputation and ML classification of hosts and comparison stars into an evolutionary multi-objective optimization algorithm. We test several candidates for the classification model, starting with a binary classification for giant planet hosts. Upon confirmation that the eXtreme Gradient Boosting algorithm provides the best performance, we interpret the performance of both the imputation and classification modules for binary classification. The model is extended to handle multilabel classification for low-mass planets and planet multiplicity. Constraints on the model’s use and feature/sample selection are given, outlining strengths and limitations. We conclude that the careful use of this technique for host star recommendation will be an asset to future missions and the compilation of necessary target lists.

In this paper, we analyze and interpret light curves obtained by observing with the HST telescope the transit of exoplanet HD 189733b across the disk of the star. Observations are carried out in a wide wavelength range of 5500–10 500 Å, which makes it possible to identify the relation between the wavelength and the data obtained during the interpretation of the radius of the planet. It is also shown that this dependence can be explained by the presence of a Rayleigh atmosphere on the planet while the possible parameters of this atmosphere are also approximately estimated.

It is shown that a number of superfast, with periods <2 d, exoplanets revolve around parent stars with periods, near-commensurate with PE and/or 2PE/π, where the exoplanet resonance timescale PE=9603(85) s agrees fairly well with the period P0=9600.606(12) s of the so-called “cosmic oscillation” (the probability that the two timescales would coincide by chance is near 3×10−4; the P0 period was discovered first in the Sun, and later on—in other objects of Cosmos). True nature of the exoplanet P0 resonance is unknown.