Jonti Horner

The Search for the Inbetweeners: How packed are my TESS systems?

Over the last fifteen years, the number of known transiting exoplanets has risen dramatically, primarily as a result of two great space observatories: Kepler and TESS. Ongoing studies of the planetary systems discovered by those spacecraft have reveal that many host multiple planets - and there is a growing consensus that that trend will only become more pronounced as observatory facilities on Earth continue to push the search for alien worlds to ever smaller planets. A common theme among transiting exoplanet systems that host multiple planets is that those systems tend to be ‘dynamically packed’ - in other words, that the planets therein are so close to one another that there is no room for additional planets to exist on stable orbits between them. In this work, we examine seven planetary systems discovered by TESS that each contain two confirmed exoplanets. We ask the question ‘Are these systems dynamically packed, or is there room for additional planets between those that have already been identified.’. To answer this question, we present the results of detailed and extensive suites of high-resolution n-body dynamical simulations that investigate the stability of hypothetical Earth-mass planets in these systems. Our results will help to direct the future search for additional planets around these stars, identifying those systems that are ideal targets for future follow-up work.