Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract/Objectives

As of now, the number of discovered exoplanets has exceeded 5000, yet the existence of exomoons, which are satellites orbiting exoplanets, remains unconfirmed. To identify potential exomoon candidates, we conducted a survey on the observational data of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). This research involved the generation of planetary and lunar orbits utilizing orbital elements, the computation of flux based on Green's theorem, fitting the modeling light curves to TESS data, performing Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, and ultimately selecting seven systems believed to harbor exomoon candidates. These findings are valuable for exomoon discoveries and related researches in the near future.

Results/Contributions

My master’s thesis focused on the finding of potential exomoons through fitting the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) data with the modeling transit light curves. In this research, we included 176 systems as our targets and utilized the orbital elements to generate the planet’s and the additional moon’s orbits. Based on the orbits, we calculated the total flux of these systems and fit the modeling light curves with the observational data. Through performing MCMC sampling to determine the planetary and moon’s parameters, we compared the reduced chi-square values and the Bayesian Information Criteria (BIC) values between the planet-only model and the planet-plusmoon model, and finally determined seven systems to be the candidates hosting a potential exomoon. While transit timing variation (TTV) and transit duration variation (TDV) analyses have yet to confirm these candidates, this research identifies promising targets for future follow-up.

Keywords

ExoplanetExomoonTransiting Exoplanet Survey SatelliteLight Curves