Date of Award

2019

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Natural Sciences

First Advisor

Ruppeiner, George

Area of Concentration

Physics

Abstract

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is detecting exoplanet candidates around bright stars. These detections will be confirmed using ground-based telescopes. Many of these planets will be left unobserved for some time after the TESS observations, causing knowledge of their ephemerides (the position of the exoplanets in their orbit at a give time) to deteriorate as measurement errors compile with each subsequent unobserved orbit. Mock observations by TESS were modeled through use of a simulated population of exoplanets (Barclay et al. 2018) to estimate the error in the predictability of future transits, and to study how that error increases as time elapses. It was determined that planets with periods of '15 days are the most at risk for expiration, as these are likely only observed for two or three transits in only one of TESS's observation sectors. Planets with radii > 5 Earth radii and those observed with high signal-to-noise ratios retained strong ephemerides up to a year after the initial TESS detections. This knowledge of how the ephemerides expire allows prioritization of candidates for follow-up observations and the preservation of valuable resources.

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