Universit`A Degli Studi Di Napoli “Federico Ii
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UNIVERSITA` DEGLI STUDI DI NAPOLI \FEDERICO II" Scuola Politecnica e delle Scienze di Base Area Didattica di Scienze Matematiche Fisiche e Naturali Dipartimento di Fisica \Ettore Pancini" Laurea Triennale in Fisica Characterization of exoplanets via photometric transit with the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite Relatori: Candidato: Prof. Giovanni Covone Luca Cacciapuoti Dott. Elisa Quintana Matr. N85/857 Dott. Veselin Kostov Anno Accademico 2018/2019 \...to explore new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before." -Star Trek 1 Contents 1 Stars and planets 6 1.1 Formation of stars . 6 1.1.1 The HR diagram . 7 1.2 Stellar parameters . 8 1.2.1 Coordinates and distance . 8 1.2.2 Brightness: apparent and absolute magnitude . 10 1.2.3 Color and temperature: the blackbody radiation . 10 1.2.4 Mass . 11 1.3 Formation of planetary systems . 12 1.3.1 Inner and outer planets . 12 2 Exoplanets detection 15 2.1 A brief history of discoveries . 15 2.2 Detection methods . 16 2.2.1 Direct imaging . 16 2.2.2 Microlensing . 17 2.2.3 Radial velocity . 17 2.3 Transit . 18 2.4 Light curves of transiting planet . 18 2.4.1 The shape of a transit . 19 2.4.2 A geometric model: observables . 19 2.4.3 The unique solution . 20 2.4.4 Smooth curve: limb darkening . 21 2.5 Eclipsing binaries and Variable stars. 21 2.6 Multiple transits . 22 3 The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite 24 3.1 Beyond Kepler . 24 3.2 Mission Overview . 25 3.3 The observatory . 26 3.3.1 Charged Coupled Device & Point Spread Function . 27 3.4 Sky observing . 28 3.5 Target Selection: TIC & CTL . 28 3.6 The ground network . 29 2 3.7 TESS data products . 30 3.7.1 Target Pixel Files . 30 3.7.2 Full Frame Images . 31 3.7.3 Light curves . 32 4 A candidate exo-system: TESS Object of Interest 175 33 4.1 Target star: L98-59 . 33 4.2 The software tools lightkurve and exoplanet . 34 4.2.1 A first display of LCs from TPFs . 34 4.2.2 Periodograms . 36 4.2.3 Period analysis with exoplanet . 36 4.2.4 Aperture Photometry & Difference Imaging . 37 4.3 TOI 175 transits . 38 4.4 Background signal analysis . 40 4.5 Suspected Eclipsing Binary . 42 4.6 Planets parameters . 43 4.7 Conclusions about the exo-system . 46 5 Conclusions 47 Bibliography 47 3 Introduction What if today someone comes to us claiming Earth is a unique place in the whole Universe? One may agree with such a statement because life, as we know it, seems to be an earthly peculiarity so far. Some others, though, would argue that it's at least unlikely that no other planet with the same characteristics and life-hosting potentiality exists. This question has been partially answered for the first time in 2014 when the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's team for Kepler mission (Bolmont, Raymond, von Paris, Selsis, Hersant, Quintana & Barclay, 2014) discovered an Earth-sized planet orbiting in the so called habitable zone (HZ) around the M-dwarf star Kepler-186. We have to keep in mind, though, that a planet orbiting in the HZ is not yet to be defined as habitable itself. Further studies are to be done to accept this classification. These studies regard the atmosphere of said exoplanets and will be ARIEL and JWST' mission (Kempton et al.,, 2018). TESS work on candidates for these two mission will be of fundamental importance. Kepler-186f, as it's been named, was just the first of many Earth-sized planets discovered from then on. This type of planets fall in a wider ensemble known as \exoplanets". An exoplanet is a planet orbiting a star outside the Solar System. A modern estimate of the number of exoplanets we know nowadays amounts to around four thousands bodies. Why is it so important to study them? One could backfire the question asking things like "How Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is important?" or "Is Da Vinci's Monna Lisa that important?". There are people to whom studying the secrets of the Universe looks of huge importance without even having to think about it. Someone would say the quest for the quest' sake. But why shall this quest be embraced by everyone? I here itemize some unsolved questions that could be answered through exoplanets studies: • Are planetary systems like ours common in the universe? Is there any trend among these systems in the universe? • How frequently do rocky planets establish in the so called habitable zone? How frequent life could be in our universe? • How is pre-biotic material, which supports bacterial life, distributed in proto-planetary discs? • The quest for habitable planets also means looking for the conditions in which life can rise. Where did we come from? Is there life beyond Earth? 4 • What if one day we will have handled the technology to move from our birthplace? We could use a precise archive of possible destinations. Even though some of these reasons look far in space and time, this kind of research could be of inestimable value for our early posterity. This thesis aims to introduce the extra solar planets argument, the linked detection methods and a modern mission in the field. Chapter 1 is a general introduction on stars and planets: their formation and describing parameters which will come in handy during the explanations in the remaining chapters. Chapter 2 presents the methods for exoplanets detection with particular focus on the transit method, introducing the concept of light curve. Chapter 3 consists of a review of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission launched in early 2018. Chapter 4 contains the analysis of a recently discovered planetary system around TESS Object of Interest 175 (TOI 175) conducted alongside an international TESS research team. Conclusions aim to present the bright future in this field of research. 5 Chapter 1 Stars and planets 1.1 Formation of stars Star formation takes place in gigantic dust and gas clouds which go by the name of Interstellar Medium (ISM). The whole process of formation is triggered by gravitational collapse: when ISM clouds mass exceeds a maximum value called Jeans mass, the materials start converging. Some considerations can be easily made by looking at Jeans mass formula Carroll & Ostlie (1996): 3 1 5 k T 2 3 2 MJ = : (1.1) GµmH 4πρ The equation shows how the critical mass has a super-linear dependence on 1 temperature T and a radical one on ρ . In a formation event, the collapsing region gets denser and denser as material particles are squashed in a smaller region. This would normally cause an increase in temperature but the cloud is transparent to this IR radiation so that the collapse is nearly isothermal in this first stage. The increase in density forces the Jeans mass to diminish so that some sectors begin an individual collapse in a so-called fragmentation process. At this phase gravity is the only force acting upon the system, according to Newton's second principle: d2r GM = − : (1.2) dt2 r2 Solving the second order differential equation (Carroll & Ostlie, 1996) one can find the so-called free-fall timescale: 1 3π 2 t = (1.3) ff 32Gρ However, the order of magnitude of the free-fall time is 105 years, which is not the actual amount of time required for star forming processes and this is because hydrostatic equilibrium is eventually reached when temperatures grow, slowing the process. When the cloud is way too dense for the radiation to pass through, 6 Figure 1.1: The image shows protostar HOPS-383 in the Orion nebula. The left side images are taken by the Kitt Peak National Observatory in 2004 while the right ones are courtesy of Spitzer mission in 2008. the internal temperature begins to rise, until it becomes predominant in the process, eq. 1.1. In this situation of nearly hydrostatic equilibrium the rate of collapse near the core of the cloud slows and we refer at the dense object at the center of the collapse as a protostar. The initial spin of the cloud will translate into a much larger one as the collapse goes on and this will flatten the cloud into a debris accretion disk. After the protostar is formed and accretion continues, so much gas is gath- ered by it that temperatures become so high (107K) that hydrogen fusion can be triggered. When a star burns hydrogen into helium it is said to be in the main sequence. This stage lasts for over the 90% of a star lifetime. 1.1.1 The HR diagram The HR diagram [Carroll & Ostlie (1996)] plots magnitude and surface temper- ature of stars. It is based on a star spectrum. The spectrum of a star is a range of frequencies in which the star emits or absorbs light. The bright lines of a spectrum are an index of which elements are radiating away while the dark ones enable us to understand which elements absorb certain wavelengths blocking light in that range. In 1890s Harvard's professor Edward C. Pickering and his assistant Williamina P. Fleming classified spectra of stars with capital letters according to the strength of the hydrogen lines in them. Latter kinds of classification were made by one of Pickering's assistants, Annie Jump Cannon, who listed them according to the surface temperature. This sorting is now known as the Harvard's classification and it consists of seven types: O, B, A, F, G, K, M, from the hottest and bright- est O-giants to the faintest and coolest M-dwarf stars.