Revisiting KELT-19Ab, WASP-156b and WASP-121b in the TESS Era

Abstract

We present a re-analysis of transit depths of KELT-19Ab, WASP-156b, and WASP-121b, including data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The large $\sim$21$\arcsec$ TESS pixels and point spread function result in significant contamination of the stellar flux by nearby objects. We use Gaia data to fit for and remove this contribution, providing general-purpose software for this correction. We find all three sources have a larger inclination, compared to earlier work. For WASP-121b, we find significantly smaller values (13.5 degrees) of the inclination when using the 30 minutes cadence data compared to the 2 minutes cadence data. Using simulations, we demonstrate that the radius ratio of exoplanet to star ($R_{p}/R_{\ast}$) is biased small relative to data taken with a larger sampling interval although oversampling corrections mitigate the bias. This is particularly important for deriving sub-percent transit differences between bands. We find the radius ratio of exoplanet to star ($R_{p}/R_{\ast}$) in the TESS band is 7.5$\sigma$ smaller than previous work for KELT-19Ab, but consistent to within $\sim$2$\sigma$ for WASP-156b and WASP-121b. The difference could be due to specific choices in the analysis, not necessarily due to the presence of atmospheric features. The result for KELT-19Ab possibly favors a haze-dominated atmosphere. We do not find evidence for the $\sim$0.95\,$\mu$m water feature contaminating transit depths in the TESS band for these stars but show that with photometric precision of 500ppm and with a sampling of about 200 observations across the entire transit, this feature could be detectable in a more narrow $z-$band.