2022RAA....22e5005Y

Transit Timing Variation (TTV) of hot Jupiters provides direct observational evidence of planet tidal dissipation. Detecting tidal dissipation through TTV needs high precision transit timings and long timing baselines. In this work, we predict and discuss the potential scientific contribution of the SiTian Survey in detecting and analyzing exoplanet TTV. We develop a tidal dissipation detection pipeline for the SiTian Survey that aims at time-domain astronomy with 72 1 m optical telescopes. The pipeline includes the modules of light curve deblending, transit timing acquisition and TTV modeling. SiTian is capable of detecting more than 25,000 exoplanets among which we expect ∼50 sources to show evidence of tidal dissipation. We present detection and analysis of tidal dissipating targets, based on simulated SiTian light curves of XO-3b and WASP-161b. The transit light curve modeling gives consistent results within 1σ to input values of simulated light curves. Also, the parameter uncertainties predicted by Markov Chain Monte Carlo are consistent with the distribution obtained from simulating and modeling the light curve 1000 times. The timing precision of SiTian observations is ∼0.5 minutes with one transit visit. We show that differences between TTV origins, e.g., tidal dissipation, apsidal precession and multiple planets, would be significant, considering the timing precision and baseline. The detection rate of tidal dissipating hot Jupiters would answer a crucial question of whether the planet migrates at an early formation stage or random stages due to perturbations, e.g., planet scattering or secular interaction. SiTian identified targets would be constructive given that the sample would extend tenfold.