Astronomia hoje: um roteiro para caracterização de exoplanetas descobertos na missão TESS usando a linguagem Python.

Abstract

Research in astronomy is currently populated by several survey missions like TESS – Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite space mission, whose main mission is to find exoplanets through the transport method. Such data are made available in their own virtual catalogs or aggregated by research funding agencies, such as the Encyclopaedia of exoplanetary systems and the Exoplanet Follow-up Observing Program (ExoFOP), which were used in this research. To efficiently access, analyze and process such databases to solve problems related to astronomy, especially exoplanetology, it is necessary to use computational methods for statistical treatment and visualization of results. In this way, a code was developed in the Python programming language to analyze the light curves of stars with exoplanets discovered by the transit method and by the TESS space mission, in order to obtain three parameters of the exoplanets: orbital period, semi-axis major and planetary radius, along with data on the host star, such as mass and radius, obtained through other methods and survey missions. Using basic principles of physics and mathematics, such as Kepler's 3rd Law and the calculation of the area of a circle, it was possible to determine those parameters in good agreement with the literature, which use more variables to model the observed systems. In general, the stars selected to observe the lightcurves were stars without intrinsic variability, with exoplanets larger than Earth, but not as massive as Jupiter, which revealed a set of five exoplanets of varying types: super-Neptunes, mini -Neptunes and hot super-Jupiters. As a new result, the semi-major axis of the exoplanet 1173 b was obtained, with a value of 0.07034 AU. This result proves the effectiveness of the adopted methodology of using computational science, demonstrates the ease of access and verification of scientific data and how simple models can act as facilitators of understanding contemporary research.