Searching for Transit Timing Variations in Young Planetary Systems (2024)

Undergraduate: Ana Lopez Murillo

Faculty Advisor: Andrew Mann
Department: Physics and Astronomy

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The discovery of young (<800 Myr) transiting planets has provided a new avenue to explore how planets form and evolve over their lifetimes. Mass measurements for these planets would be invaluable, but radial velocity surveys of young systems are often overwhelmed by stellar activity. Transiting timing variations (TTVs) offer an alternative route to masses that are less impacted by signals from the host star. Here we search for TTVs in a sample of 40 young systems hosting 59 transiting planets using data from Kepler, K2, and TESS. We recover previously reported TTVs in AU Mic, TOI-2076, and TOI-1227, and identify new TTVs in 2 systems, including the 17 Myr planet HIP 67522 b. We show that these TTVs are not an artifact of spots or other challenges specific to young stars. None of the TTVs detected in multi-transiting systems are sufficient for a measurement of the planets' masses. However, these discoveries should drive more transit observations required to fully characterize the signal and eventually measure the masses.