Description:

Title: The Extraordinary Diversity of Super-Earth Mass Planets Revealed with Transit Timing

Speaker: Daniel Jontof-Hutter, Pennsylvania State University

Host: Sourav Chatterjee

Abstract:  

Transit timing variations (TTV) in multi-transiting systems enables precise characterizations of low-mass planets and their orbits. The increase in sensitivity to planetary mass with orbital distance with TTVs provides a sample that complements low mass radial velocity detections, by characterizing transiting planets with lower incident fluxes. This pushes exoplanet characterization to the regime of sub-Earth size planets and out to Venus-like distances. Here we demonstrate the astonishing diversity in the density of super-Earth mass planets. We summarize these and other contributions to exoplanet science from TTVs.

Keywords: Physics, Astronomy, Astrophysics