10 September 2018

This radial velocity curve provides confirmation of a hot Jupiter candidate discovered by the TESS spacecraft and confirmed by data from the CHIRON spectrograph on the CTIO/SMARTS 1.5m telescope. The star, TIC201248411 (also known as HIP 65 from the Hipparcos mission), is a K dwarf at a distance of 60.4 parsecs with V = 11.13. TESS revealed a possible transiting companion with an orbital period very close to 1 Earth day.

Eight observations were obtained with CHIRON on the nights of 08 and 09 September 2018 (UT dates), a few days after release of the first TESS Alerts list on 05 September. Radial velocities were extracted using a pipeline created by Leonardo Paredes and clearly show the companion orbiting with a period of 0.98 days, a match to the TESS transit data. The orbital fit yields an eccentricity of 0.17 and residuals to the fit of only 11 m/s.

Thus, the potential planetary companion indicated by TESS has been confirmed with CHIRON, and has a mass of 2.2 Jupiter masses.

RECONS Team: Leonardo Paredes, Hodari James, Rodrigo Hinojosa, Todd Henry