Detection and characterization of sub-jovian planets with NGTS

The Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) is an ambitious ground-based survey with the objective of discovering small gaseous exoplanets and large super-Earths around bright host stars. While planets in this regime show a large diversity of compositions, our understanding of their properties are limited due to the relatively small number of such systems with an accurate mass and radius measurement.
The aim of this project is to gain insights into the formation and evolution of small gaseous planets using data from the NGTS. The three main science objectives are:

• Detect and Characterize small gas planets in NGTS data.
• Define the border of the sub Jovian desert based on empirical data.
• Analyse the occurrence and diversity of hot sub-Jovian planets.

As part of the first object we have developed a neural network to increase the senstivity of NGTS to small gas planets. We have also published NGTS-5b, a highly inflated planet on the upper boundary of the sub-Jovian desert, with roughly the same mass as Saturn.  We are continuing to analyse data from NGTS and other surveys to better understand the formation history of these systems.