The Detectability of Transit Depth Variations due to Exoplanetary Oblateness and Spin Precession

Understand

Knowledge of an exoplanet's oblateness and obliquity would give clues about its formation and internal structure.

• In principle, a light curve of a transiting planet bears information about the planet's shape, but previous work has shown that the oblateness-induced signal will be extremely difficult to detect.
• Here we investigate the potentially larger signals due to planetary spin precession.
• The most readily detectable effects are transit depth variations (T$\delta$V) in a sequence of light curves.