The Migration and Evolution of Eccentric Planets (MEEP) survey

Hot Jupiters (HJs) were the first exoplanets discovered in the 1990s, and since then, over 500 have been discovered. Their extreme sizes and orbital configurations have elicited questions about their formation and evolution, and several hypotheses have been produced to address these questions: in situ formation, gas-disk migration, and high-eccentricity tidal migration. While a large sample of HJs has been discovered, the discovery and analysis techniques used to characterize them vary significantly, leading to biases that are difficult to quantify and limit our ability to interpret features of the sample. To address the need for a statistically useful sample, we introduce the Migration and Evolution of Eccentric Planets (MEEP) survey. This survey is part of an ongoing effort to utilize data from NASA’s TESS mission to discover and characterize all remaining HJs that transit bright stars (G < 12.5), leading to a homogeneous, magnitude-limited, complete population to directly test models of the different evolutionary mechanisms. This series of papers is complemented by ongoing efforts to reanalyze the sample of already confirmed HJs with the same methods, ensuring that no planets that meet our criteria are excluded from the final population. I will present the first paper in this series announcing the discovery and characterization of nine new transiting HJs from TESS (TOI-1855 b, TOI-2107 b, TOI-2368 b, TOI-3321 b, TOI-3894 b, TOI-3919 b, TOI-4153 b, TOI-5232 b, and TOI-5301 b). With over 80 HJs now discovered by TESS, I will discuss the features of this sample that have shown thus far that high-eccentricity migration plays an important role in the formation and evolution of giant planets. Over the next few years, the MEEP survey, combined with other efforts within the TESS community, will lead to a magnitude-limited, homogeneous population of precisely measured HJ parameters that should conclusively answer questions about their evolutionary origins, a question that is 30 years in the making.