A long spin period for a sub-Neptune-mass exoplanet

Kavli Affiliate: Andrew Vanderburg

| First 5 Authors: Ellen M. Price, Juliette Becker, Zoƫ L. de Beurs, Leslie A. Rogers, Andrew Vanderburg

| Summary:

HIP 41378 f is a sub-Neptune exoplanet with an anomalously low density. Its
long orbital period and deep transit make it an ideal candidate for detecting
oblateness photometrically. We present a new cross-platform, GPU-enabled code
greenlantern, suitable for computing transit light curves of oblate planets at
arbitrary orientations. We then use Markov Chain Monte Carlo to fit K2 data of
HIP 41378 b, d, and f, specifically examining HIP 41378 f for possible
oblateness and obliquity. We find that the flattening of HIP 41378 f is $f leq
0.18$ at the 95% confidence level, consistent with a rotation period of
$P_text{rot} geq 22.2$ hr. In the future, high-precision data from JWST has
the potential to tighten such a constraint and can differentiate between
spherical and flattened planets.

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